According to the German astronaut who has been tapped to become his country's first commander of the International Space Station, humans could set foot on Mars within decades if they wanted to.
Alexander Gerst said the space station offers a unique opportunity to test the technology needed to explore other planets, especially if if its lifetime is extended beyond 2020.
"It is very clear to me that those manned missions to the moon and Mars, human missions, will happen", he told the Associated Press in an interview at the European Space Agency's astronaut training center in Cologne, Germany. "But we need the decision as a society. And once we do the we are ready to go, basically"
According to Gerst, just like the movie The Martian, an astronaut fending for himself on the red planet, will be a realistic glimpse of the not too distant future.
"It shows us what we can possibly reach on a few year's time" he said. "I'm actually quite excited by the fact that us humans, we could fly to Mars and maybe you and I will live to see it."
NASA aims to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. Astronauts have been living continuously aboard the 250 mile high International Space Station since 2000. This month, the space station hit the milestone of 100,000 orbits around Earth - the equivalent of 10 round trips to Mars or almost one way to Neptune.
The European Space Agency saw its budget increase almost 20 percent this year to 5.25 billion euros and the agency is on course to active Europe's satellite navigation system Galileo_ a rival to the American GPS, Russia's Glonass and China's Beidou systems -this decade.
Earlier this year, ESA chief Jan Woerner suggested established a village on the mo=oon once the International Space Station reaches the end of its lifetime. There are no concrete plans for this yet, though and experts says the space station hasn't outlived its usefulness_ over 100 experiments are conducted during each mission to the space station.
No comments:
Post a Comment