> A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.
Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission.
Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back.
And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option.
That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight.
It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple).
From an economic capacity and technological perspective, we absolutely could build a vessel that had enough radiation shielding and thrust to get some people there (and probably even back). No need for a 1,000 day time frame. That's not enough to ensure the health and safety of the crew of course, but "marginal" is different than "ensure".
Of course that isn't politically possible, but the other poster seemed to be talking about our capacity as a civilization in their comment, and really, the NASA outline presented in the article doesn't do much more to demonstrate it than my silly mission above. The "interesting" level for a civilization would be to build an actual self sustaining colony on Mars, and we probably don't currently have the capacity to do that (the challenges go from having the equipment needed to being able to manufacture it).
Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission.
Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back.
And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option.
That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight.
It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple).
A trip to Mars and back is nearly 1000 days.
It’s not gonna happen anytime soon.