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Elon Musk To Unveil Mars Spacecraft Later This Year, For 2025 Flight (foxnews.com)
frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Musk said he was 'hoping to describe the architecture' of the spacecraft at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico in late September. "That will be quite exciting," Musk said. 'In terms of the first flight to Mars, we are hoping to do that around 2025.' As for his plans to go into space, Musk said he was hoping to reach the International Space Station 'four or five years from now.'
The rocket is not in question.
Right now the long pole in manned Mars surface missions is not rocket launch technology, it is Mars surface survival.
What kind of structure will people live in on Mars? How will it land? Heavy large structures that would be required for human habitation have not been landed on Mars to date and that is quite tricky.
How will the people live there? What kind of suits and structures will they use for radiation protection? For oxygen and water generation? For food production?
Obviously all of these problems have been addressed on ISS but only in the sense of solutions that can be relatively quickly resupplied from earth which won't be the case with a Mars surface mission.