Photo by mohammad alizade on Unsplash & Photo by Luca Rüegg on Unsplash

There are high hopes that mankind will set camp on Mars (and beyond) in the not-too-distant future. So high that we’ve even jumped the gun to make a movie about it. But the stories that circulate involving our efforts to set foot on the Red Planet sometimes fail to clarify one teeny tiny detail.

Since Mars is the fourth rock from the Sun, and Earth is the third, you’d think that the trip there will be relatively swift and uneventful? But that’s not even remotely true