When it comes to space travel, there's no shortage of enthusiasm to get humans to Mars, with Space X's Elon Musk saying his company could take passengers to the Red Planet by 2025, and NASA being asked by Congress to achieve the mission by 2033.

But while making the trip could be technologically feasible in the next decade or two, are humans really physically and psychologically ready to abandon Earth and begin colonising the Red Planet?

Nope, not a chance, according to a recent paper by cognitive scientist Konrad Szocik from the University of Information Technology and Management in Poland.

Szocik argues that no amount of year-long Martian simulations on Earth or long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station (ISS) could prepare human astronauts for the challenges that Mars colonisation would provide.

"We cannot simulate the same physical and environmental conditions to reconstruct the Martian environment, I mean such traits like Martian microgravitation or radiation exposure," Szocik told Elizabeth Howell at Seeker.

"Consequently, we cannot predict [the] physical and biological effects of humans living on Mars."

In a recent article, Szocik and his co-authors discussed some of the political, cultural, and personal challenges Mars colonists would face, and in a nutshell, the team doesn't think human beings could cut it on the Red Planet — not without making changes to our bodies to help us more easily adapt to the Martian environment.

"My idea is that [the] human body and mind is adapted to live in the terrestrial environment," Szocik told Rae Paoletta at Gizmodo.

"Consequently, some particular physiological and psychological challenges during [the] journey and then during living on Mars probably will be too difficult for human beings to survive."

While NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko famously spent a year on the ISS— the ordeal was not without significant physiological effects and pains resulting from so much time living in space.

But those hardships would be much less than what travellers to Mars would experience, who would be making much longer journeys — and not knowing when or if they could ever return to Earth.

"These first astronauts will be aware that after the almost one-year journey, they will have to live on Mars for at least several years or probably their entire lives due to the fact that their return will most likely be technologically impossible,"the authors explain.

"Perhaps these first colonisers will know that their mission is a 'one way ticket'."

The researchers acknowledge that inducing travellers into a coma-like state might make the voyage itself more bearable, but once they've arrived, colonists will be faced with an environment where artificial life support is a constant requirement — that is, until some far-off, future terraforming technology can make Mars' arid and freezing environment hospitable.

Until that happens, the researchers think that humanity's best prospects for living on Mars would involve some kind of body or genetic altering that might give us a fighting chance of survival on a planet we've never had to evolve on.

"We claim that human beings are not evolutionally adapted to colonise cosmic environments,"the authors explain.

"We suggest that the best solution could be the artificial acceleration of the biological evolution of the astronauts before they start their space deep mission."

While the team doesn't provide details of what that would entail in their paper, Szocik told Gizmodo that "permanent solutions like genetical and/or surgical modifications" could make colonists capable of surviving on Mars in ways that unaltered humans can't.

According to NASA's former chief scientist for human research, Mark J. Shelhamer, while these ideas may be interesting and help further the discussion about what it will take for humans to adapt to Mars' environment, once talk turns to genetics, you run into a minefield of other potential issues.

"Already, people have suggested selecting astronauts for genetic predisposition for such things as radiation resistance,"says Shelhamer.

"Of course, this idea is fraught with problems. For one, it's illegal to make employment decisions based on genetic information. For another, there are usually unintended consequences when making manipulations like this, and who knows what might get worse if we pick and choose what we think needs to be made better."

Those sound like pretty fair points — especially considering Szocik goes as far as to suggest that "human cloning or other similar methods" might ultimately be necessary to sustain colony populations over generations without running the risk of in-breeding between too few colonists.

Clearly, there's a lot to work out here, and while some of the researchers' ideas are definitely a bit out there, we're going to need to think outside the box if we want to inhabit a planet that at its closest is about 56 million km (33.9 million miles) away.

For his part, Shelhamer is confident that the right kind of training will equip human travellers for the ordeals of their Mars journey — and if current estimates on when we can expect to see this happen are correct, we won't have too long to wait to see if he's right.

"I think we can give astronauts the tools — physical, mental, operational — so that they are, individually and as a group, resilient in the face of the unknown,"he told Gizmodo.

"What kind of person thrives in an extreme environment? What types of mission structures are in place to help that person? This needs to be examined systematically."

The research is published in Space Policy.

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On Tuesday, President Trump signed legislation S.442, giving NASA more than $19.5 billion in funding as well as an ultimatum — get to Mars by 2033.

Notably, NASA isn't going to be dealing with the same cuts as other science and medical agencies (they are set to lose enormous portions of their budget). This prompted Recode co-founder Kara Swisher to enthusiastically tweet at Musk, "Somewhere @elonmusk is smiling."

Musk, however, seemed anything but happy at the claim, responding: "I am not. This bill changes almost nothing about what NASA is doing. Existing programs stay in place and there is no added funding for Mars."

He continued, "Perhaps there will be some future bill that makes a difference for Mars, but this is not it."

Other experts tend to agree with this assessment — that this budget is not a great leap forward, but maintaining the status quo. "I think it's really more of a vote for stability," notes Scott Pace, who is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

'Unlocking the mysteries of space'

On the surface, this bill may seem promising. Trump has expressed support for a crewed exploration of Mars, and in his inauguration speech he said he's "ready to unlock the mysteries of space."

The 146-page legislation document calls for several missions in addition to the following:

• Journey to Mars — asks NASA for a roadmap to send people to Mars by 2033; also steers the space agency away from pursuing the Asteroid Redirect Mission (a plan to capture an asteroid, tow it into orbit around Earth, and have astronauts explore the space rock).
• Aeronautics — calls on NASA to be a leader in aviation and hypersonic aircraft research; also asks the space agency to look into supersonic-aircraft research that would "open new global markets and enable new transportation capabilities."
• Radioisotope power systems— implores NASA to deliver a report on how it plans to make plutonium-238 — an exceedingly rare nuclear fuel for deep-space robots — and detail what its nuclear-powered exploration plans are.
• Congressional declaration of policy and purpose — amends previous laws to make it part of NASA's mission to "search for life's origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe."

However, in addition to not securing added funds for Mars, the Trump administration recently came under fire about the ways in which new budgets cut NASA's Earth Science funds. According to

According to Business Insider, "if enacted, that budget would cut several major space agency initiatives, including the Office of Education, and seeks to terminate the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE), Orbital Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3), Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), and CLARREO Pathfinder missions."

Notably, all of these missions are directly related to Earth and its environment.

Fighting for planet Earth

To this end, Musk — who is a strong advocate for the environment and renewable energy — has been taking some heat regarding his involvement with Trump's science advisory board.

In a 2015 speech at the Sorbonne University, he urged students to "talk to your politicians, ask them to enact a carbon tax" and to "fight the propaganda from the carbon industry."

And this was not his only call to action. At the end of the day, Musk is as much a proponent for the environment as he is for Mars. In a 2013 interview for USA Today's Innovators and Icons series, Musk stated that the current climate struggle is literally life or death: "We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe."

It now seems that, despite Musk's involvement with the Trump administration, even he cannot influence the White House in the ways he'd like… and he's not happy.

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MARCH 24, 2017 —It’s not easy off-roading on an alien planet. Harsh conditions abound, and you can’t call AAA if you get a flat.

NASA’s car-sized Curiosity rover continues to experience exactly these challenges. A routine inspection on March 19 uncovered two breaks in the raised ribs that reinforce the left-middle wheel’s delicate skin, further evidence of the wear and tear that has been a constant challenge for the mission.

Scientists say the unwelcome discovery doesn’t jeopardize scientific goals, but it underscores the need for continued careful driving and perhaps some creative thinking.

"All six wheels have more than enough working lifespan remaining to get the vehicle to all destinations planned for the mission," said Curiosity project manager Jim Erickson in a press release. "While not unexpected, this damage is the first sign that the left middle wheel is nearing a wheel-wear milestone.”

Each of Curiosity’s six knee-high wheels features a skin just half as thick as a US dime. Much-needed reinforcements come in the form of zigzag ribs about as thin as an iPhone. A suspension system evenly distributes the buggy’s 800-pound Martian weight over the finely machined cylinders.

Designing the wheels required a balancing act weighing the need for strength with the intricate landing system. Upping the thickness by just four hundredths of an inch would have added more than 20 pounds, which would have complicated the physics of the “seven minutes of terror” sky crane scheme used to land the rover on the surface of Mars, according to science journalist and planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla.

Driving nearly 10 miles on the Red Planet has come at a cost. Various punctures and holes in the wafer-thin wheel skin have been worrying scientists for years, but they were largely cosmetic blemishes. Horrible to look at, but not structurally significant.

Last week’s check caused concern because it revealed the first and second instances of rib breakage, a sign that the middle-right wheel has been significantly weakened.

The good news is that scientists suspect they’ll be able to complete their current objectives as planned. "This is an expected part of the life cycle of the wheels and at this point does not change our current science plans or diminish our chances of studying key transitions in mineralogy higher on Mount Sharp," said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada.

The farthest potential target sits 3.7 miles up the mountain from Curiosity’s current location, and to get there, mission planners will have to rely on a bag of driving tricks they’ve developed ever since the damage first started cropping up four years ago.

For rover driver Matt Heverly, the worst day of the mission came a little more than year in. “When we saw these images, we saw a hole that was much larger than we had expected. This did not match anything we had seen in our tests. We didn't know what was causing it. We didn't know if it was going to continue," he said at a JPL event celebrating the second anniversary of the landing.

The problem was a never-before-seen feature of the Martian surface: pointy rocks embedded in the ground that didn’t give or roll out of the way.

"We misunderstood what Mars was," Mr. Erickson told Mrs. Lakdawalla. "There is very hard rock that doesn't erode away uniformly. And you get ventifacts [wind-eroded pyramidal rocks] that are sharper than we'd like, and that are cemented into the ground. And so when you drive over them, they don't skitter out of the way, they don't get pressed into the sand, they just are something that you have to have the wheel go up and over.

After the discovery, NASA sought out places on Earth with similar conditions and ran extensive tests with a Curiosity clone, finding that mileage until wheel failure depended on what the driving surface was like: from five miles on rocky bedrock to essentially indefinite driving on sandy plains, according to Lakdawalla’s blog post on the topic.

Equipped with a better understanding of the problem, NASA scientists have learned to be better drivers and route planners. The name of the game is avoiding the rocks. Early on in the mission there were more long drives, where the rover would navigate “blind” from A to B without worrying too much about what’s in the middle.

Now NASA does more short drives, especially in bad terrain. Using Curiosity’s cameras to peer dozens to a hundred feet ahead, drivers can micromanage the path to avoid any particularly spiky-looking rocks. This approach has slowed down the mission, but can significantly extend the wheels’ lifespan.

Another possibility for the future is to put the rover into reverse. While the weight falls evenly on all six points of contact, the front and middle wheels bear the brunt of the burden because they’re constantly being driven into oncoming rocks, while the rear wheels drag behind.

"The rear wheels are still almost pristine," Erickson told Space.com in 2015.

Driving backwards for a while could even things out, but it too comes at a cost. The rover would be riding blind with antennas blocking the view, and turning it back around at the start and end of each drive would add over 30 extra feet to each drive, spending an increasingly valuable currency.

But NASA has a history of long-lived rovers and using creative engineering to restore capacity after a system failure. No one expected exploring Mars to be easy, and every broken rib offers new insight into the challenges Curiosity’s successor will face.

"It's just one of these cases where Mars is going to give us a new deal, and we're going to have to play the cards we get, not the ones we want," Erickson said.

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As part of their effort to kick-start the eventual colonization of Mars, SpaceX is sending an unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars. Initially, that mission was set for 2018, but is now re-scheduled for 2020. Now, SpaceX says they’re working with NASA to select a suitable landing site for their first Dragon mission to Mars.

At a presentation in Texas on March 18th, Paul Wooster of SpaceX said that they have been working with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to identify candidate landing sites on the surface of Mars. In order to aid colonization, the sites need to be:

• near the equator, for solar power
• near large quantities of ice, for water
• at low elevation, for better thermal conditions

But finding a site that meets those conditions is difficult.

According to SpaceNews, the study done with NASA initially recognized 4 regions in Mars’ northern hemisphere, all within 40 degrees of the equator. They are Deuteronilus Mensae, Phlegra Montes, Utopia Planitia, and Arcadia Planitia.

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Deuteronilus Mensae

Deuteronilus Mensae (DM) is located between older, cratered highlands and low plains. DM shows evidence of glacial activity in its surface features. In fact, there are still glaciers there, which makes it a desirable source of ice.

Phlegra Montes

Phlegra Montes (PM) is a system of mountains on the Martian surface, over 1300 km across. It’s a complex system of basins, hills, and ridges. They are likely tectonic in origin, rather than volcanic, and the region probably contains large quantities of water ice, perhaps 20 meters below the surface.

Utopia Planitia

Utopia Planitia (UP) is the region where the Viking 2 lander set down in 1976. At 3300 km in diameter, UP is the largest impact basin in the Solar System. In 2016, NASA found a huge deposit of underground ice there. The water is estimated to be the same volume as Lake Superior.

• NASA has finally revealed details about its plan to send astronauts to Mars.
• The plan calls for building an outpost to orbit the moon and test Mars hardware.
• A crew of four may have to spend up to three years inside of a Mars spaceship — yet never land on the planet.
• It remains to be seen if NASA's flat budget can facilitate reaching Mars by 2033.

For years, NASA has talked about sending people to Mars with its gigantic new rocket, the Space Launch System, and a new spacecraft called Orion.

But NASA hasn't said exactly how it plans to use this hardware, which it's spending $40 billion to develop — not even with the publication of a 36-page Mars exploration plan in October 2015.

Fortunately, a plan may finally be coming into place.

On March 21, President Donald Trump signed a law that mandates NASA send people to Mars by 2033. Then, a week later, the space agency published its most detailed plan yet for reaching the red planet.

The scheme is neither for the claustrophobic nor the faint of heart. It involves locking astronauts into a tube-shaped spaceship, sending them into deep space for three years, and giving them no form of emergency escape beyond the moon.

What's more, astronauts would only orbit Mars in 2033 — they'd never attempt a landing.

That's according to a document by William Gerstenmaier, the head of NASA's human exploration and operations directorate, that he presented during a NASA advisory council meeting on March 28. We learned about the presentation via a story by Eric Berger at Ars Technica.

"NASA is leading the next steps into deep space near the moon, where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems needed for challenging missions to deep space destinations including Mars," NASA said about the plan in a press release.

Getting to Mars in five phases

Gerstenmaier's program lists five phases to reach Mars.

Phase 0 involves using the International Space Station "as a test bed to demonstrate key exploration capabilities and operations, and foster an emerging commercial space industry" with partners like SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital ATK, and others. We're currently in this phase.

Phase 1 is ambitious, involving six launches between 2018 and 2025.

First, NASA wants to launch its inaugural SLS rocket, a 321-foot behemoth that's designed to rival the Saturn V rockets that blasted Apollo astronauts to the moon. If the maiden flight and tests of its Orion spaceship went well, the space agency would launch five more SLS rockets.

The first of those five would send NASA's unrelated Europa Clipper probe to Jupiter, where it would study an icy moon with a hidden ocean that may be habitable to alien life. Four other missions would each launch a piece of a new space station, called the Deep Space Gateway, into orbit near the moon — a region called cislunar space — where four astronauts would help assemble and provision it.

"The gateway could move to support robotic or partner missions to the surface of the moon, or to a high lunar orbit to support missions departing from the gateway to other destinations in the solar system," Gerstenmaier said in the release.

Phase 2 would build on the lunar space station by launching a Deep Space Transport to it in 2027. Then, around 2028 or 2029, four lucky astronauts would spend up to 400 days inside the 41-ton tube as it orbits near the moon. Their mission: make sure the DST works and nothing critical stops working.

Phase 3 would begin around 2030, assuming the DST and its crew experienced no problems. Another SLS flight would restock the spaceship with supplies and fuel, then yet another launch would load it with four people — the first crew to visit Mars.

Their two- to three-year flight "would likely involve a Venus flyby and a short stay around Mars" and "would offer no hope for an emergency return once the crew leaves cislunar space," Berger wrote.

Phase 4 would happen beyond 2033 and is fairly nebulous at this point. All it calls for in Gerstenmaier's document is "development and robotic preparatory missions" to deliver habitats and supplies to the surface of Mars, plus eventual "Mars human landing missions."

Will NASA put the first boots on Mars?

It remains to be seen whether NASA can pull off this grand plan on the relatively flat budget Congress keeps handing it.

During the Apollo moon missions, NASA made up more than 4% of the US budget. Today, its share has shrunk to about half a percent.

Even if NASA manages to execute this plan, it may have competition from the private partners it hopes to involve. The private sector may even beat NASA to Mars.

Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, recently said he planned to send people to Mars by 2022. Boeing has also challenged SpaceX in getting to the red planet. Musk said he was OK with this because all he wanted to do was colonize Mars and protect humanity from self-imposed annihilation or a rogue asteroid.

"I think it's good for there to be multiple paths to Mars ... to have multiple irons in the fire,"Musk said in August.

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President Trump has made a long-distance call to Peggy Whitson, a decorated NASA astronaut who just broke the US record for the most cumulative days spent in orbit.

Whitson and her astronaut colleague Jack Fischer took Trump's call at the International Space Station (ISS) live on NASA Television on April 24. Their conversation covered everything from getting to Mars, microgravity's effects on the human body, and the necessity of drinking water recycled from urine.

Trump was flanked by his daughter Ivanka in the Oval Office, as well as NASA astronaut Kate Rubin. He congratulated Whitson then peppered her and Fischer with questions.

"How does it feel to have broken such a big and important record?" Trump asked Whitson, who floated weightless in front of a large banner that said, "Congrats Peggy!! New U.S. High-Time Space Ninja".

She told Trump that it was a "huge honor," and gave credit to NASA employees on the ground for making her achievement possible.

Whitson also brought up the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law on March 21.

"We're all very much looking forward to, as directed by your new NASA bill, … getting to Mars in the 2030s," she said.

When Trump asked the two astronauts what NASA was learning from work conducted on the ISS, Whitson rattled off a number of recent experiments and engineering efforts.

"[The space station] is providing a key bridge from learning on Earth to going somewhere in deep space," she said. "We need to understand how microgravity is affecting our bodies, and we need to understand it deeply."

She also noted the great lengths engineers and astronauts are going through to make deep-space travel feasible.

"We're also cleaning up our urine and making it drinkable," she said.

Trump responded: "That's good, I'm glad to hear that. Better you than me."

He then asked the two crew members how it felt to be in space.

"Sir, it was awesome," said Fischer, who joined the crew aboard the ISS four days ago aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, adding that he arrived with "his Russian colleague," cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. "And now I'm talking to the President of the United States while hanging from a wall."

The president said he'd try to get NASA astronauts to Mars during his first term, "and at worst during my second term, so we'll try to speed it up a little."

With NASA's current projected funding level of $19.5 billion (about 0.5% of the national budget) getting people to Mars in a few years' time is not likely. By comparison, the space agency's funding level during the Apollo moon missions exceeded 4.5% of the national budget — about nine times higher.

Also, NASA's current stated plan is to reach Mars by 2033.

However, the unnamed mission-in-planning won't put any boots on the ground there. Instead, a crew of four people will depart from a small, newly built space station near the moon, then orbit the red planet (and potentially fly by Venus along the way).

That mission is neither for the faint of heart nor the claustrophobic: The round-trip from Earth to Mars will happen inside a 41-ton tube called the Deep Space Transport, and it may take as long as 3 years.

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A new government audit reveals that NASA is running low on spacesuits and new ones might not be available in time.

Astronauts have been using the same suits since 1981. The suit were only designed to last 15 years, but NASA was able to extend the lifetime during Shuttle era by returning the suits to Earth for regular repairs.

Without the Shuttles, NASA has no way or returning the suits so they are kept on the space station. And recent incidents show that these suits are well past their due date.

The biggest problem is the primary life support systems, which are the large backpacks that astronauts wear during spacewalks. In 2013, one of the units malfunctioned while an astronaut was in space.

First Italian astronaut, Luca Parmitano, had a leak in one of the units that supplied water water to the suit. The water spilled over into his ventilation, which caused his helmet to start filling with water.

By the time he reached safety back on the station, over a liter of water had filled his helmet, entering his mouth, ears, nose, and eyes. Ultimately, he was unharmed.

In recent years, NASA has had 2 other water-related incidents, though not as severe as Parmitano’s. Today, only 11 of the 18 life support systems are considered safe to use. But those units may not even last long enough.

NASA plans to continue sending astronauts to the ISS to at least 2024. These astronaut will need safe, functioning spacesuits to perform spacewalks that are critical for maintaining the space station. The main concern is that the remaining 11 life support systems will not last to 2024.

Over the last decade, NASA has invested nearly $200 million toward developing new and better spacesuits. However, because NASA's budget and missions mainly rely on government funding, its focus has changed numerous times over the years from Moon-focused to Mars-focused.

And since different environments in space require different types of spacesuit protection, it was impossible for the space agency to stick to just one spacesuit design. 

As a result, NASA divided its funding across three companies: $135.6 million toward the Constellation Space Suit System, $51.6 million to Advanced Space Suit Project, and $12 million for the Orion Crew Survival System.

None of the three companies have had enough funding to complete and develop a new spacesuit, yet. The report recommends that NASA develop a formal plan that fits their immediate needs. It also suggests that NASA determine if current spacesuit designs can meet the agency’s needs, or if next-generation suits are necessary.

The clock is ticking. NASA has already scheduled 17 spacewalks between now and 2020.

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Stephen Hawking is about to test his theory about the future of the human race in a BBC documentary.

In what the British broadcaster is calling a "landmark" two-part series, Hawking will explore his belief that humans must colonize another planet within 100 years if we are to survive.

The University of Cambridge professor will travel the world alongside his former student Christophe Galfard and engineering professor, Danielle George, in search of answers.

The trio will investigate technological possibilities including plasma rockets and human hibernation, the BBC said. It added that the programme will show Hawking's ambition "isn’t as fantastical as it sounds."

Titled "Expedition New Earth," the television show will air later this year and is made by Brook Lapping, the production company behind documentaries including "Inside Obama's White House."

Hawking spelt out his theory last year in a talk at the Oxford Union debating society, where he claimed humanity probably only has about 1,000 years left before extinction.

"We must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity," he said. "I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."

In his 74 years, Hawking has spoken several times about our doomed fate, with the risk of things like nuclear war increasing as well as the oncoming threat of global warming. He has also warned that the development of artificial intelligence could end mankind.

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In an upcoming BBC program, Stephen Hawking has a new message for humanity: Get off Earth within the next 100 years or perish. In order to survive as a species, humans must colonize other planets.

But Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has previously said that humans just aren't ready to live on other worlds. In 2015, he visited Business Insider to discuss his thoughts on where humans will go next and why.

Hadfield became a mainstream figure thanks to his YouTube videos from space and wide social media presence. Now retired, Hadfield is the best-selling author of "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth."

Christine Nguyen contributed reporting on a previous version of this article.

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• For months, NASA's Kennedy Space Center has worked with a concept car company and a TV network to design and build a Mars rover.
• The unnamed vehicle was built for the site's visitor complex and debuted in early May.
• Though it's a demonstration vehicle for educational use, it was designed to be as realistic as possible.

Since late 2016, NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, an unnamed cable television network, and a company that builds concept vehicles have been quietly collaborating to build a full-size rover for exploring Mars.

Video and images of the completed vehicle started appearing on social media sites on May 9, following an official unveiling of the unnamed rover in Florida that day.

One clip shared on Instagram shows the rover, which resembles the Batmobile from the movie "Batman Begins," slowly idling around a road in front of the complex:

Business Insider first learned about the rover via a Reddit post titled "What is this beast?!"

So what is it?

Marc Parker, a designer and builder of the new rover, told Business Insider that it's a six-wheeled, all-electric vehicle that was created "with every intention" of overcoming obstacles on the sandy, rocky red planet.

However, the unnamed rover will never roll across Mars. According to Parker, NASA instead plans to take it on a cross-country tour of the US for the space agency's upcoming "Summer of Mars"— an educational event designed to inspire the public about space exploration and interplanetary travel.

Marc and his brother, Shanon Parker, began building the rover around November 2016, after NASA approached their company, Parker Brothers Concepts, with the idea. Marc says that he and Shanon launched their business about five years ago to build "outlandish" vehicles for television and movie productions. ("We're the guys they call when everyone else says 'it can't be done,'" Marc says.)

But Marc says NASA didn't fund the rover, whose cost he wouldn't provide, and that it was bankrolled by a private company involved in the project.

"We're also filming for a reality television series that's going to be coming out about this build," Marc told Business Insider. While he's under a non-disclosure agreement with the TV network, Marc says it's "one of the bigger cable networks." (An Instagram photo shared on Shanon's account shows members of the "Mythbusters" TV shows, which airs on the Discovery Channel.)

Inside the Mars rover prototype

Parker Brother Concepts made the rover from scratch from about November 2016 through early April 2017.

The two owners and a few of their employees, plus a number of suppliers they deal with, worked tirelessly on its construction for those few months.

"Me and the guys, we averaged about 80 to 100 hours a week, each. We worked 10-, 12-, 14-hour days, seven days a week since late last year," Marc says. "If I thought about how many hours we put into this thing, I'd probably cry. It's way too many."

Marc said a formal announcement of the rover and TV show is forthcoming. However, he and Shanon have posted several teaser images and videos on their Instagram accounts.

The above clip, posted to Instagram by SeaDek (a marine product supplier that worked on the rover with Parker Brother Concepts), shows the interior of the vehicle. A second video provides a view of the rover lit up in the dark:

Other images posted by those involved reveal other features.

For instance, below is a photo of the six 50-inch-tall, 30-inch-wide wheels, which Marc said are designed to let the fine sands of Mars slip through:

A Facebook post by the company shows the same wheels under construction:

Another photo shows the window of the rover with carbon-fiber accents and a NASA logo:

And this image gives a front view of the vehicle inside the fabrication shop of Parker Brothers Concepts:

A faux research rover build for Mars

A NASA spokesperson told Business Insider that the project "is not really a NASA-affiliated thing" and is run by its independently operated Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. (Representatives at the visitor complex did not immediately return our calls.)

However, Marc Parker said NASA introduced his company to engineers and scientists at Kennedy Space Center who are actively working on the space agency's new legal mandate to reach Mars by 2033.

According to Marc, NASA gave his company a few parameters for the vehicle and had two schools of thought for it: either a small scout vehicle "for four astronauts to investigate, explore, and get test samples" or a "full research laboratory".

The company started with an electric motor, solar panels, and a 700-volt battery and built the vehicle around that, Marc says, "since there's no gas stations up there"— and decided to tackle both concepts at once.

"What we actually came up with was a dual-purpose vehicle. It actually separates in the middle. The rear section is a full lab, the front area is a cockpit for going out and doing scouting," he says. "The lab section can actually disconnect ... and be left on its own to do autonomous research. That way the scout vehicle can go out to do its thing without the fuel consumption and extra weight, then come back later."

While the cab is lined with earthly "creature comforts" such as GPS, air conditioning, and radio, Marc says the body is made entirely out of aluminum and carbon-fiber to keep the weight down. He says it hasn't been officially weighed, but estimated the rover — which is 28 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 11 feet tall — will come in at about 5,000 pounds.

"A Honda Civic weighs about 3,500 to 4,000 pounds, and a 5,000 pounds is about the weight of a pickup truck," he said, emphasizing that the concept vehicle is very light given its size and capabilities.

Marc says that while the rover could drive as fast as 60-70 mph, it's designed to roll along at 10-15 mph or less, since it'd be used to methodically roll over dunes, rocks, craters, hills, and more. He added that each wheel has an independent suspension to overcome such obstacles with ease.

Of all the projects that Marc says he and his brother have worked on, he said "this one has blown us away the most." He hopes it inspires NASA and the public alike to dream big about the future of space exploration.

"Movies are cool, TV is cool, but it's something else to be part of a thing that could inspire kids to go Mars and live in outer space," he says.

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• Mars used to have oceans, but they began to dry out roughly 4.2 billion years ago.
• However, oasis-like pools of water may have sheltered any microscopic alien life.
• New maps reveal that shallow pools were common on Mars for hundreds of millions of years.

Today Mars is a freeze-dried rock with so little air, you couldn't even gasp if you tried.

The scene was much different about 4.5 billion years ago, though: Water covered about 20% of the planet's surface, and 400-foot-tall megatsunamis raced across ancient oceans. Alien life might have emerged and thrived on this warm, wet, and dynamic world — that is, until solar storms began to blow away the air and water some 300 million years later.

However, new maps of the planet created by US Geological Survey (USGS) scientists reveal that habitable oases once littered the bottom of Valles Marineris — a canyon system the size of the continental United States — hundreds of millions of years after Mars' oceans evaporated.

If groundwater consistently fed these lakes, pools, and puddles, as rock formations hint, it's possible that microbial life could have taken shelter there.

"There was a huge potential for a habitable environment here, and there's a lot of promise for [microscopic] fossils, perhaps, or some biological signals,"Chris Okubo, an astrogeologist at USGS and an author of the new maps, told Business Insider.

The oases of ancient Mars

On Earth, your average oasis is fed by underground sources of water, such as a leaky aquifer.

Okubo and other scientists think the process was similar on Mars.

"[G]roundwater was abundant and occasionally seeped onto the ground surface, forming pools," Okubo said in a USGS press release. "These pools would have been habitable for life, just as they are on Earth."

Okubo told Business Insider that he first saw signs of these ancient oases in a small part of Valles Marineris.

This huge feature is sometimes called the "Grand Canyon" of Mars— but it's about four times longer, 20 times wider, and nearly five times deeper than Earth's famous natural landmark. Using satellite images, Okubo detected thin layers of sediment in the canyon's basin that had piled up, one atop another, over about 500 million years.

Such layers form when groundwater gurgles to the surface, creating a shallow pool — and a potentially habitable oasis, says Okubo. Over time, grit blows into the water, which responds by pushing up more liquid to form another pool. More grit then blows in. This cycle repeats itself over eons to form a flat terrain of finely layered sediments.

Fast-forward a few billion years, and wind erosion has carved into and exposed these layers for scientists like Okubo to detect from space.

Evidence of such shallow pools on Mars isn't new. However, their newly discovered extent should raise some eyebrows, says Okubo.

The new work by Okubo and his USGS colleagues zoomed out for a wider view of the canyons, yet used incredibly detailed images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera to look for signs of ancient shallow pools. That analysis revealed telltale sediment layers over much of the gigantic canyon's basin.

What's more, the maps hint that shallow pools existed between about 3.5 billion and 3 billion years ago; in an older yet similar blink of a geologic eye, life on Earth may have appeared.

"We're only seeing the top of the pile," Okubo said. "We don't know what's going on further back in time because we can't see it — it's buried."

If these shallow pools existed at least 700 million years earlier — or when the oceans of Mars began to evaporate — they may have bridged a crucial gap for microbial life on the planet.

To find out for certain, Okubo says we'll need to send robots or people to dig into the soil or take readings with ground-penetrating radar.

"This work argues soundly for a future landing site, whether it's a sample return or a rover," he said. "Anything would be great."

NASA now has a legal mandate to get people to Mars by 2033, though the first crew of four astronauts may just orbit the world. However, the space agency's Mars 2020 rover is expected to launch in July 2020, meaning it should arrive more than a decade earlier and gather samples for a future return mission.

Researchers are now studying possible landing sites for the nuclear-powered robot. NASA has narrowed the list to three candidates, though none of them yet include Valles Marineris.

Does Mars still have water?

Scientists today think Mars still has a water table, though one that must be hidden deep below its surface.

"Although [satellites] in orbit around Mars haven't found any subterranean aquifers, there's a sneaking suspicion we're only seeing the upper kilometer or so, because radar's a challenge," Michael Meyer, a lead scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute, told Charles Q. Choi in an Oct. 2016 story for the space agency.

Over the past decade scientists believed they'd found a smoking gun for water on Mars: dark streaks in sand on the slopes of dry gullies, called "recurring slope lineae" (RSL), which show up around the same time each season.

However, closer looks at more than 100 of these RSL sites revealed no presence of groundwater or its byproducts. (The water might come from salts absorbing a little water in the air, then melting any ice that's slowly built up when the climate temporarily warms up.)

That's not to say Mars is bone-dry today, and that astronauts won't be able to recover water through drilling or other means, like burning hydrogen fuel with methane captured from Martian air.

The planet's apparent desolation also doesn't make scientists like Okubo give up hope: Detecting fossils that are even billions of years old would verify the existence of extraterrestrial life.

"I wouldn't be surprised. I suspect there to be life elsewhere in the universe," Okubo said. "This would be an exciting finding, but it wouldn't change my perspective. I don't think life as we know it on Earth is a singular event."

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When the first astronauts reach Mars in the 2030s, they'll never set foot on the planet's surface. Instead, NASA wants its plucky human crew to orbit the desert world for about a year, then return home.

But that doesn't mean astronauts couldn't explore Phobos or Deimos — two tiny and intriguing moons of Mars.

Lockheed Martin, a company that's building NASA's Orion spaceship, recently put forth a tantalizing pitch for a sortie mission: Put astronauts inside an eight-legged, rocket-powered spacesuit that can crawl, walk, or hop across a moon's surface.

"We're calling it the Spider Flyer-Walker suit," Timothy Cichan, the Lockheed engineer who leads the company's Mars exploration planning, told Business Insider.

The new spacesuit concept is detailed in a white paper about the company's "Mars Base Camp" architecture, which a representative sent to Business Insider.

Cichan says the Spider Flyer concept came from the need to keep Lockheed's Mars mission proposal lean: Though NASA has a mandate to send people to Mars by 2033, and do groundbreaking science in the process, Congress will give the space agency a relatively limited budget to get the job done.

By building a small spacesuit instead of a larger lander, the thinking goes, NASA could save thousands of pounds' worth of weight and millions of dollars— and come home with unprecedented samples of an alien world.

"The thing about these moons is that they're very small, low-gravity objects,"Cichan says. (Phobos is 685 million less massive than Earth's moon, for example, and Deimos weighs 5 billion times less.)

"You want to interact with the surface, but when you reach down, you don't want to push yourself away," he says.

Here's how Lockheed's Martian moon mission might work.

How to be a spidernaut

First, a four- to six-person crew would safely enter orbit around Mars inside the Mars Base Camp mothership.

Next, two or three of the astronauts would board an excursion vehicle tipped with an Orion capsule, which would rocket away from the mothership and toward a moon of Mars.

"The gravity is pretty weird around these things, so you have to keep your distance," Cichan says of Phobos and Deimos.

After the excursion vehicle pulls up, an astronaut would don a standard extravehicular spacesuit and exit the capsule through an airlock. She would then climb around to the Spider Flyer-Walker, strap in, and detach from the capsule.

The Spider Flyer would have small thrusters in it, so the astronaut could then propel toward the moon all on her own.

The suit's eight legs would splay out ahead of a soft landing:

Once on the surface, the suit's thrusters would fire continuously and gently to press the spider legs into the loose soil below. This would pin the Spider Flyer to the moon while allowing an astronaut to move her arms and legs.

"We can also articulate those spider legs. We can even do a little bit of walking or hopping along the surface," Cichan says, adding that the astronaut could bend over to scoop up soil samples along the way.

Once her science mission is complete, the astronaut would zoom back toward the excursion vehicle with bags of Martian moon grit.

Will NASA buy it?

The idea isn't as out there as it might seem, since Lockheed has a solid track record when it comes to rocket-powered spacesuits.

For example, the company designed and built the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). The device was used by astronauts during three space shuttle missions in the 1980s.

"Bruce McCandless used an MMU to become the first untethered astronaut in space," says Cichan. (The 1984 excursion led to the famous photo of an astronaut floating above the Earth against the blackness of space.)

This history of reliability, combined with the ostensible cost savings and reduced weight of sending a small spacesuit instead of a large lander, should be attractive to NASA — but it remains to be seen if the space agency selects the idea.

Cichan sounds confident NASA may go for it.

"From a technology development point of view, particularly for an orbital mission, we have almost everything we need today, or we're on a development pathway to get it," he says. "Mars really is within our reach within about a decade, and these ideas are us making the most use of funding that Congress has laid out."

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Humanity has sent dozens of probes and satellites to Mars over the decades.

These plucky spacecraft have beamed back dazzling photos, inspired hit sci-fi movies like "The Martian", and even gave Elon Musk the idea to colonize the red planet.

But how much do you really know about Earth's next-door neighbor?

Even though humans have yet to arrive and there are still plenty of mysteries to solve, scientists have figured out a great deal about Mars.

From what it's like on the surface to the most impressive landmarks to the presence of an ancient ocean (and tsunamis!), keep scrolling to learn 12 incredible facts about Mars you probably didn't know.

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Surface Area

Mars has almost as much surface as Earth has land — but that doesn’t account for the 71% of Earth that’s covered in water.

Temperature

The average surface temperature on Mars is -81˚F, 138 degrees chillier than on Earth.

Atmosphere

The Martian atmosphere is 61 times thinner than Earth’s, and  it consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, which makes up just 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere.

Using the Age of Exploration as a basis, Neil deGrasse Tyson takes a close look at what life on Earth could look like in another 500 years. Spoiler Alert: It's going to get crowded. But he's got some solutions if we take action today. Following is a transcript of the video.

We will not survive to that day unless major changes take place.

500 years ago, Earth was a frontier. Columbus and others were exploring the Earth. If we continue increasing the population of the Earth as we have been over the past decade or so, 500 years from now there will only be enough room on Earth's surface for everyone to only stand up straight. So, clearly, that's not the future we want.

So, either we need another planet to live on — terraform Mars and go live there — or we have to control our population in some fundamental way. Or we live very high and very deep in the ground and have different, sort of, intersecting, or non-intersecting, habitats in which we function. Vertically, rather than horizontally.

We will not survive to that day unless major changes take place in our conduct to one another and to the extent in which we embrace the role of technology as being basically the lone source of our survival.

On my deathbed, the one thing I will regret most is not living longer just to see what more inventions people come up with. I love seeing and testing and being a part of the ingenuity of our own species.

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StarTalk Radio is a podcast and radio program hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, where comic co-hosts, guest celebrities, and scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe. Follow StarTalk Radio on Twitter, and watch StarTalk Radio "Behind the Scenes" on YouTube.

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Since late 2016, NASA's privately-run Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, an unnamed cable television network, and a company that builds concept vehicles have been quietly collaborating to build a full-size rover for exploring Mars. NASA revealed the rover concept during their "Summer of Mars" event at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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Elon Musk's private company SpaceX has big plans to usher in a new era of reusable rockets that could send the first humans to Mars and return them home. Here's how the company plans to land on the Red Planet as soon as 2018.

Produced and animated by Alex Kuzoian. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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In September, the tech mogul Elon Musk walked onto a stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, and laid out his vision to colonize Mars with his company SpaceX.

The talk was bold for a couple of reasons. First, the plan itself is ambitious — Musk hopes to fly 1 million people to the red planet as a sort of "backup drive" for Earth at cost of $100,000 to $200,000 per person. Second, he delivered the presentation weeks after a SpaceX rocket blew up on a launchpad.

Now Musk has written a new paper that outlines the most recent version of his Mars vision.

Published in the June issue of the academic journal New Space, the article appears to be an edited summary of Musk's September talk. (A full transcript of that, along with Musk's slide deck, is available here.) In the text, Musk describes his argument for reusing rockets to reduce the cost of spaceflight thousandfold. The paper also includes descriptions of early designs of the enormous spacecraft he hopes to build.

Although the recent publication does not present too many new details, several important events have happened since Musk's original presentation.

For one, Musk further elaborated on his Mars plans in October during an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. He outlined a four-stage process to inhabit Mars, explained how he'd create fuel and air on the planet, and disclosed his name for the main spaceship: Heart of Gold, a nod to the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

In the speech, Musk also disclosed the existence of a giant fuel tank for his Mars spaceship. That colossal tank, made entirely out of carbon fiber, passed a big pressure test in November, according to Musk.

Additionally, the investigation into the uncrewed Falcon 9 rocket that exploded on a launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, closed in January, and SpaceX resumed launching rockets the same month.

SpaceX is also ramping up hiring. It had 473 open positions in March and 487 as of this posting, and many are dedicated to the company's Mars-exploration efforts.

And Musk's company is gearing up to launch its biggest launch system ever: Falcon Heavy. In a tweet on June 8, the SpaceX CEO said the first super-heavy-lift rocket could take off as soon as September.

If all goes according to plan, the Falcon Heavy could whisk two paying customers around the moon in 2018.

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Scientists have long known high levels of radiation exists on Mars. But could it be so high that humans won't be able to handle when we get there? Following is a transcript of the video.

Going to Mars may be more dangerous than we thought. The major problem is high-energy space radiation. Scientists know that cosmic rays can damage DNA. They had just overlooked how bad it could get. 

A team re-examined how damaged DNA can cause cancer. They then estimated levels of radiation exposure in space and on Mars. Their results are devastating. 

The risk of cancer on Mars is twice as high as previously thought. 

It comes down to how damaged DNA spreads throughout the body. A detailed study in mice reveals a sinister side to radiation. Damaged DNA doesn't just keep to itself.

It sends signals to nearby healthy cells, which triggers the healthy cells to mutate, which could cause more cancer.

Previous models hadn't accounted for this domino effect. Even radiation shielding only moderately reduces the risk. Luckily on Earth, we're protected from this danger. 

Earth's magnetic field traps most harmful space radiation. But in deep space, and on Mars, there is no such protection. 

Right now, there's limited studies of just how great this risk is. The scientists stress more research is needed before a crewed mission to Mars. 

The big question now is:  if the risk is too great, will we still try?

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On July 4, 1996, the Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars. Since then, NASA has had at least one robot studying the red planet, slowly uncovering its secrets.

Video courtesy of NASA. 

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