For many years, man has made fiction about colonizing other planets. As population and environmental issues continue to be problems on Earth, there are those who are looking to our neighboring planets to build later. Now this might come closer to reality as the U.S. Congress seeks to have NASA establish a colony on Mars.
According to the Christian Science Monitor a House bipartisan bill that will give NASA support in establishing a colony on Mars is in the works. One of the aims of the bill is to prevent future Presidents from interfering with the program. It also grants NASA $19.5 billion for development programs for rockets and spacecraft for Mars.
Although this new bill aims to continue support NASA in sending manned missions to Mars in the coming two decades, it is not the first bill in support of this. In 2014 HR 4412 was passed that would pave the way to giving NASA a program in establishing a Mars colony, as Investigative Headline News said in its report.
Another report says that NASA has been given the task to landing people on Mars by 2030. Perhaps one of the challenges in having a Martian colony is how it would be governed. Elon Musk, CEO for SpaceX, said that Mars governance would be more of a direct democracy rather than of having elected officials, as Quartz reports. That would mean the people in the colony would vote on the issues they would deal with while there.
Researchers say that treaties here on Earth could serve as blueprints for how Mars would be governed. In governing Antarctica, our seas and outer space governments generally share resources. That might be how the colony on Mars would operate, where resources would have to be shared in order to survive.
Before establishing all these, the challenge would be how to get to Mars, and that is where legislators could not agree on. Some say that NASA should first go to the Moon to test the new technology that we have. President Obama though feels that a direct travel to Mars would be much better. The target would be 2025 and the mission should be on Mars by 2030.
This election year the candidates have their own visions as well. Hillary Clinton said that the space program is important for scientific innovation, while Donald Trump sees more involvement of American industries.
iTechPost has also much news on Mars, such as NASA and the robots used to explore Mars.
