There was a general discussion at the Bauman State Technical University in Moscow about the possibilities of a manned mission to Mars. Some of this may have been triggered by the mid-February comments of RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev, who proposed working with Elon Musk on developing plans to go to Mars. But the discussion on Mars has been a perennial discussion whenever members of the space community come together.
There was, of course, no general agreement on when such a mission could be accomplished, and there were nay-sayers as well, who considered the conditions in space so aversive to human life that it would not be possible, including the scientific director of the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Lev Zeleny. Noting that it was the Soviet Union that made the first automatic landing on the red planet in 1971 (the Mars-3 apparatus), the scientist nevertheless warned against sending a manned mission there. “Firstly, those same galactic rays are dangerous, and secondly, everyone probably remembers the film ‘The Martian,’ which shows one of the main dangers—a powerful sandstorm that is impossible to fight, it destroyed the settlement’s infrastructure, and only one person managed to escape,” said Zeleny.
