8 Ways We're Getting Ready To Go To Mars

8. Thinking Local

To think big, you've got to think small. Well, as small as space travel can get anyway.

One of the big problems we have with space travel, is that the earth is so clingy. Its gravitational pull makes just escaping the atmosphere a difficult and expensive task. Getting a big, heavy spacecraft off the ground requires large amounts of fuel that, in turn, makes it even bigger and heavier.

People laughed at George W. Bush when he floated the idea of a lunar outpost, but it's really not a bad idea at all. Building a space age "truckstop" on the moon would allow us to store resources there to pick up on our way through, so that we don't have to worry about getting them all off the Earth's surface at once and then on to Mars. The moon's lower escape velocity would make their weight (and therefore their fuel consumption) less of an issue.

In another foray into deep-but-not-that-deep space on the cards for NASA, is their Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which intends to lasso ourselves an asteroid. This is less about creating an off-world base, and more of a proof of concept for many of the technologies that would take us to the red planet.