If You Wanna Fly to Mars, Visit Iceland First
When preparing for a long trip, you might look up the route on Google Maps, watch a walk-through on YouTube, or ask someone who has been there recently. But what if you're bound for a place where humans have never existed? I'm talking about our next-door neighbor, the Red Planet. NASA is planning a mission to Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s, and that's not as far in the future as you might think. Rookie astronauts spend at least two years training just to go into space, and for every hour they spend in space, they need to spend ten hours underwater on Earth. This training only applies to spacewalks and the International Space Station, however. So far, some 600 people have been to space, but humans have never set foot on Mars. Traveling to this planet will require a different kind of training.