What We Need to Know Before Landing Astronauts on Mars

Elon Musk and his SpaceX rocketeers are blueprinting a plan to land humans on Mars in 2025 and to land payloads onto the Red Planet's surface at each 26 month opportunity starting in 2018. The report, now in draft form, is called "Essential Precursor Activities for a Near-Term Human Mars Mission." It is the output from an independent virtual panel of researchers sponsored by Ceres Robotics of Montara, California. The exercise had neither encouragement nor approval from SpaceX nor NASA.