Engineering the Perfect Astronaut

At the International Astronautical Congress last September, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk convinced many die-hard space engineers he could get a fleet of private rockets filled with thousands of people to Mars. Musk's speech was long on orbits, flight plans, and fuel costs. But it was short on how any of those colonists would survive. In fact, the Mars journey would likely be a dead end. Bathed in radiation and with nothing growing on it, the Red Planet is basically a graveyard.