What It Costs to Reach Mars
The cost of reaching Mars, line by line: launch prices, whole-mission estimates, and what still has to get cheaper or be invented.
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Everything published by The Galactic Center, newest first: the center of the Milky Way, Mars, the mind, and the cost of living away from Earth. Each article cites its sources, and speculative ideas are labeled Hypothesis. Subscribe via feed.
Life Away From Earth: What It Costs and What It Offers
Living away from Earth is a trade. What it costs the body and mind, what it gives back, and the honest bottom line.
The Psychology of Leaving Home
Why the hardest part of going to Mars may be the people: what ground-based isolation studies show, and what distance and delay do to a small, confined crew.
The light-speed hypothesis
MarsFirst's working hypothesis, labeled as a hypothesis: why studying the galactic center might speed up human progress, what we are not claiming, and why we think the question is worth asking.
Open mysteries at the core
Five open problems at the Milky Way's core: the paradox of youth, the G objects, the Fermi bubbles, the 511 keV positron line and the GeV excess. What is established and what is not.
Sagittarius A*: what we actually know
What astronomers have measured about Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the Milky Way's center: how it was weighed, how its shadow was imaged, and how it tests Einstein.
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The physics of the Milky Way’s core, what’s measured and what’s still open, and the people working on it.
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