How long would it take to get to Mars?
On foot, in a straight line? 1,065 years.
By car? 40 years.
If your preferred mode of travel is a spacecraft—perhaps a wise choice—it should take you approximately nine months with current technology.
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To calculate how long (time) it would take to reach Mars, two factors are essential: distance and speed.
Distance to Mars
Earth is never still. It spins on its axis and orbits the Sun. Mars does the same. So the distance between Earth and Mars is always changing. The closest distance between Mars and Earth is about 56 million km (35 million miles). The average distance between the two is about 225 million km (140 million miles). The farthest distance, when they are on opposite sides of the solar system, is almost 400 million km (250 million miles).
Because both planets continue moving during a spacecraft’s journey, the launch must be planned such that the spacecraft heads toward where Mars will be at a certain time in the future, not where it is at the time of launch. It’s similar to a quarterback throwing a football to where the receiver will be after running. The path of a spacecraft takes an elliptical orbit called the Hohmann transfer. It is the most energy efficient way to align with Mars’s orbit. Because this trajectory depends on the planets being in the right positions, launching a couple of days late or early could cause the spacecraft to miss or overshoot Mars, requiring a wait of another 25–26 months for a viable launch window.
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Speed to Mars
The faster, the better, right? Increasing the speed to Mars helps reduce the time astronauts are exposed to space’s microgravity and cosmic radiation. So just how fast can humans get there?
The fastest object ever built is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. On December 24, 2024, it broke its own record, traveling at approximately 692,000 km/hr (430,000 mph). If a spacecraft could sustain the probe’s speed, a trip to Mars would theoretically take anywhere from 3 to 25 days. Unfortunately the probe is not designed for crewed missions.
There have been over 45 missions to Mars, none of them crewed. Of these, 18 of 23 U.S. missions and 2 of 21 Russian missions were successful.
For a more realistic estimate of speed, consider the Perseverance rover, which launched on July 30, 2020, and landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. It traveled at an average speed of 96,500 km/hr (60,000 mph), slowing down to 20,000 km/hr (12,500 mph) within the Martian atmosphere. Mars’s atmosphere is about 1 percent as dense as Earth’s. It is thick enough to generate intense heat during a spacecraft’s entry, but it is too thin to slow it down sufficiently the way Earth’s atmosphere does. This is why the choice between a flyby mission and a landing mission on Mars influences the spacecraft’s speed, trajectory, and therefore the time taken to reach the planet.
Other important factors determining speed include availability and cost of fuel (with tentative plans to produce propellant on Mars and only sending a crewed team after), energy management, and the maneuvering of rocket engines for optimized routes.
Can it be done in less than nine months?
In the future photon propulsion may be able to accelerate a lightweight spacecraft close to the speed of light. Philip Lubin, professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), is confident that “there are recent advances which take [photonic propulsion] from science fiction to science reality.”
Marcelo de Oliveira Souza from State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has proposed a faster path to Mars, using early asteroid orbit and rocket capabilities beyond our current technology.
Jack Kingdon, a physics graduate student researcher at UCSB claimed that a trip to Mars can be done in three months with SpaceX technology.
If one day it is in the stars for humanity to land on Mars, and you find yourself contemplating the journey there, consider these questions:
- What will you pack for the −100 °C (−150 °F) nights?
- Will you miss earthly sensory experiences?
- How do you feel about the idea of humans “colonizing” a planet?
- Are humans pieces of planet Earth?
- Who would you want with you on the journey?