Nearly a decade of anticipation has come down to this moment: the spacecraft inches to the surface as the blast effect of braking rockets kicks up red dust. An Earth-bound audience waits eagerly as an announcer reminds them of a press conference that took place years earlier—a meeting that shocked the world and embarrassed NASA, which was still at least two years from testing its Mars spacecraft with humans aboard. On that day, the company behind this private effort to reach Mars revealed that it was about to build a series of huge rockets to transport people to Mars, and that within a decade it would launch one or two of them to make the first manned landing on the Red Planet.
As Raptor 1 settles into a massive crater near the Martian equator, the astronauts aboard are already thinking ahead. Time is precious. Raptor 2 will follow within hours, carrying more explorers on board. First on the astronauts' to-do list is the deployment of a base camp habitat, part of the enormous cargo the ships have carried. They must also inflate “buildings”—domed, pressurized tents made of exotic materials that will increase their living area and act as greenhouses in which to grow food.
Some environmental similarities exist between Earth and Mars. The Martian terrain looks a lot like certain parts of Earth—the dry valleys in Antarctica or the high deserts on Hawaiian volcanoes. Many other factors will prove to be extremely challenging. A day on Mars is only thirty-nine minutes and twenty-five seconds longer than a day on Earth, but a Martian year is far longer than one on Earth—687 days—making seasons twice as long. Mars's orbit is oval, meaning seasonal variations between winter and summer are more severe than those on Earth; in the southern hemisphere, summers are warmer and winters are colder. Ultimately these Martian settlers intend to establish two bases, one below the equator in the southern hemisphere for summers and one north of the equator for winters.
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