A manned mission to Mars has been the dream of humanity at least since the 19th century, when we first saw details of the surface and thought there might be canals filled with water there.

Here I’ve looked at the history of unmanned exploration of Mars over the last 50-plus years, proposed missions to Mars, Mars settlements, and other major issues regarding traveling to and living on Mars. Some proposals have lots of details of proposed scenarios, if you want to know all of the engineering and scientific analysis work.

I grew up in the 1960s, when every kid in America was fascinated with the space program and the astronauts. I also watched not only the Apollo 11 moon landing, but all of the successive trips to the Moon and exploration of the surface. This may be a lot of the reason I became an engineer, worked for NASA in Houston for several years, and applied to the Astronaut Program myself.

My previous books on space are titled Designing and Building Space Colonies: A Blueprint for the Future and All About Moon Bases: And Our Plans to Return to the Moon. This book is written from a similar perspective. There are some probes which reported life on Mars and then other scientists questioned the results. We are still sending unmanned probes today to try to answer those questions. These three books will comprise the first three of my Living in Space series of books.