By: Sofia Grade 8
People first landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission—a feat achieved in roughly eight years from the official commitment to the landing. Yet our attempt to send humans to Mars has already spanned over 70 years, with technical studies dating back to the early 1950s. So why does Mars remain untouched by human feet? The most significant challenge lies in the orbit. Traveling to the Moon keeps spacecraft in Earth’s gravitational neighborhood, but a Mars mission requires shifting to a heliocentric orbit around the Sun. Even during optimal alignment—a window that opens only every 26 months—Earth and Mars are still separated by about 34 million miles, or roughly 150 to 200 times farther than the Moon.
This vast distance creates a cascade of problems. Prolonged exposure to deep-space radiation and solar particles make the journey far riskier than any previous human spaceflight. Imaginespending two and a half years in a confined spacecraft, with communication delays stretching from 4 to 24 minutes one way. Real-time help from Earth becomes impossible. Astronauts won’t just feel isolated and depressed—their lives will be at risk every moment, from acute illnesses to cancer and potential damage to the central nervous system.
Then comes the challenge of landing. Mars has an atmosphere that is paradoxically both too thin for parachutes alone to slow heavy payloads and yet thick enough to generate extreme heat and friction during descent. Its surface gravity is also significantly higher than the Moon’s. To land a human-sized spacecraft safely, engineers must slow it down from tens of thousands of kilometers per hour to a gentle touchdown—all while navigating these tricky atmospheric conditions.
Beyond these hurdles, many other concerns remain. Yet human enthusiasm for reaching Mars never wanes. Why? The drive is fueled by a search for past or present extraterrestrial life, a desire to understand planetary evolution (and what it might reveal about Earth’s future), and the pursuit of technologies that could enable long-term human habitation beyond our home planet.
Simply put, it’s curiosity—and a determination to build a brighter future for all humanity. The journey is undeniably difficult, but the effort is already paying off. The United States, China, and the former Soviet Union has achieved countless milestones on the path to Mars. Since the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 first touched down in 1971, progress has accelerated—from NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s to sophisticated rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance, which confirmed the presence of past water and organic molecules. Recent breakthroughs include China’s Zhurong rover (2021), NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter (the first extraterrestrial flight), and the successful extraction of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere—a critical step for future human missions.
The challenges we face—the long voyage, the radiation, the sheer complexity of landing—are real. But so is the human drive to explore. Every rover we land, every new material we invent, every young scientist who chooses this path brings us one step closer to that moment. That someone might be a student in your school right now, staring at the night sky and wondering what it feels like to stand on another world. We haven’t traveled to Mars yet. But when we do, it will be because we decided that some dreams are worth the wait.
