It probably comes as no surprise that to undertake a mission to land a manned mission to Mars comes as an enormous challenge requiring the best and brightest that humanity has to offer. Mars is far away, really far away. To put things in perspective, the Moon orbits the Earth at about 384,400 km; a staggering figure, but demonstrably surmountable as evidenced by the twelve men who have stepped foot on its surface since 1969. With that in mind, Mars offers a substantially more difficult target to hit. Mars bears an eccentric orbit around the sun, the most lopsided orbit out of the planets in our solar system. Orbiting the…

On May 25th, 1961, the United States’ President John F. Kennedy proclaimed before a Joint Session of Congress, “…I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On July 16th, 1969, merely 8 years, 1 month and 25 days later, astronaut Neil Armstrong, as a part of the Apollo 11 mission, would become the first human to set foot on another celestial body. The American space program was undoubtedly motivated by their Soviet counterparts, struggling to keep ahead in a proxy race that marked clear progress on both…