Will man ever walk on Mars?

I might be missing something, but what mission returned a vehicle from the surface of Mars back to the Earth?

 

The question should also be, when will woman walk on Mars?

Because Mars needs women.

 

Thought you were talking about punching backt thru Earth's atmosphere.

 

Isn't the Martian atmosphere like 1% of Earth's? Doesn't seem insurmountable.

 

More importantly, when with the University of Mars join the Big East?

 

Mars atmosphere is only 0.6% as thick as Earth's, so that's not really an issue.

But it's gravity is 38 percent of Earth's (twice as much as the moon). That's the problem. Whatever is small enough to land won't be powerful enough to blast off and break free. You'd have to have a second vehicle involved somehow.

 

Also wonders if there's life on Mars:

 

You don't have to return directly to Earth's atmosphere from Mars. You could dock with the ISS (if it's still up) and take a Soyuz home from there.

It goes without saying you have to have a ship that can launch from Mars. That's where water would come in handy. You can electrolyze H2O to make rocket fuel.

 

I'm not confident mankind will ever set foot on Mars. The technological savvy is there, but it would be God-awful expensive to pull it off. I think we can't find out pretty much everything we want to know with robots and the like for an infinitesimal fraction of that cost.

 

It just needs a Kickstarter fund.

 

Apollo was a Cold War show of strength and prestige far more than a public works project. And the big government types aren't exactly big backers of the space program these days (and weren't then, either).

 

Nixon was giddy to kill Apollo because it was Kennedy's idea, not because it represented some sort of governmental profligacy. That fiscal thinking was there in the background, but really didn't hit the front burner till Ross Perot.