The United States hopes to send astronauts to Mars in the early 2030s, said Transportation Secretary and acting administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Sean Duffy.
“We want to start sending payloads to the moon to start building a base there, and then in the early 2030s we want to go to Mars. It will be an eight-month mission“, he said in an interview with Fox News.
“We hope to go around the moon next April with four astronauts on board. Then we will land on the moon and stay there for eight to 12 days. The longest stay on the Moon in the past was three days“, the official added.
Duffy previously reported that the United States hopes to send astronauts to the Moon before the end of Donald Trump's presidential term.
In the spring of 2019, NASA announced the Artemis lunar program project, consisting of three stages. The first of them (Artemis I) envisaged an unmanned flight of the Orion spacecraft around the Moon and its return to Earth. The flight took place from November 16 to December 11, 2022. The second stage (Artemis II) is a flyby of the ship with a crew on board around the natural satellite of the Earth. In the third phase (Artemis III), NASA expects to land astronauts on the Moon and then send them to Mars.
Artemis II and Artemis III were originally scheduled for 2022 and 2024, respectively, but those dates have been repeatedly pushed back. Last December, NASA pushed them back to April 2026 and mid-2027.