We are made of stars

Space Exploration: 2030′s

After decades of stagnant work in low Earth orbit, the last few months have been a whirlwind of progress and good news, though not all of it’s hit the big headlines.

In the Spring there was a Planetary Society conference to determine the best way to get humans to Mars and whether or not NASA could do so on their current budget.

They can.

In fact, the concept, known as orbit-first, would cease NASA funding for the International Space Station, hand over low Earth orbit duties to private industry, and spend their budget in a progressive series of missions that would send us to orbit Mars in 2033, land there in 2039 and in 2043, their first long-term stay would begin.

This long-term stay would involve the construction of a permanent base with the following parameters (found at the bottom of page 26 in the report I linked above):

This can be loosely interpreted as the first permanent Mars colony may begin in 2043.

Lucky for us, NASA agrees with the conclusions.