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I Saw Mars

Posted on December 24th, 2007

Last night I saw Mars. It was the perfect combination. Mars was as closest to earth, while the moon was full. Mars was a small red sparkle under the moon. It was amazing that I was able to see something 54 Million miles away. You won’t be able to Mars that good again until the year 2016, so I’m hoping that everyone got a chance to see it.

I did some personal calculations on what it would take to get to Mars, fast, efficiently and safe… well sorta.

The international space station moves at 17k miles per hour. Mars was 54 million miles away, if there was a shuttle moving at a continues rate of 17k miles per hour towards Mars it would take 132 days to get to Mars.

OK, now let’s say we created a shuttle that moved 4 times the speed of the last one. That would be 68k miles per hour, at that speed it would only take 33 days. Which is only a month and a few days.

What NASA and other space organizations need to do is come up with something similar to that speed or even faster. I believe that a giant magnetic gun blast could send space vehicles flying at that speed and safe atomic energy for the rest of the way. Like a way to use Atomic energy but for a not so big explosions… but big enough to safely thrust a vehicle to Mars.