Could We Abort a Manned Mission To Mars?

StartsWithABang writes: The next great leap in human spaceflight is a manned mission to a world within our Solar System: most likely Mars. But if something went wrong along the journey — at launch, close to Earth, or en route — whether biological or mechanical, would there be any way to return to Earth? This article is a fun (and sobering) look at what the limits of physics and technology allow at present. If you're interested in a hard sci-fi, near-future look at how a catastrophic Mars mission might go, you should read an excellent novel called The Martian by Andy Weir.

Comments

Re:Should we?

[Zontar The Mindless]

The US became the space leader because the N-1 failed. Had the Russian moonshot rocket worked, they would have beaten us to the moon by a week or so.

None of the N1 launches were manned, and the US had already done a manned flyby of the Moon (the Apollo 8 mission, to be exact) exactly 2 months before the first N1 test shot was made in February 1969. The US landed 2 men on the Moon 5 months after that.

So, no, there was absolutely no chance at all of that happening.