Space: Mission to Mars

FIRST THE ROVER LANDS, AND NOW BUSH WANTS TO SEND PEOPLE. WE CAN DO IT EVEN FASTER THAN PLANNED, BUT HERE'S WHAT IT WILL TAKE

There's nothing terribly remarkable about Building 29 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston until you consider that that's where they will be storing Mars--or at least a pretty good facsimile of it. Spread out inside the sprawling structure will soon be a dead-ringer Mars base, complete with habitat modules, an extraterrestrial greenhouse and even a ground cover of volcanic dust shipped in from Hawaii--about as close as you can get to real Martian dirt without actually visiting the planet. Astronauts training for a Mars mission could spend up to 600 days in this little village, learning to live in an...

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