On March 14, the 65th anniversary of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and the cosmonaut squad was celebrated at the Zvezdny Gorodok Cultural Center. It was on March 14, 1960, that the training of the first, “Gagarin” cosmonaut squad began. There was a warm and cordial meeting of veterans – living participants and witnesses of those events, including outstanding cosmonaut pilots Boris Volynov, Valentina Tereshkova, as well as current CPC employees, Roscosmos cosmonauts, and residents of Zvezdny Gorodok.
We talked about history and new flights. But about the Moon and Mars – as about the very distant future. Most of the words about the flight to Mars were heard at the concert – in the song “And apple trees will bloom on Mars.” And in the practice and the foreseeable future of manned flights in Russia – near-Earth orbits. To Mars only in songs, dreams and dreams…
100 years ago, our outstanding engineer Friedrich Zander, inspired by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s ideas about space travel and settlement outside the Earth, proclaimed the motto “Forward to Mars!” and created an interplanetary spacecraft project (1923).
In the twentieth century, dozens of projects of rockets and ships for manned flights to Mars were developed. Let us single out the first of them: in the USA (1952, Werner von Braun) and the USSR (1959, heavy interplanetary spacecraft to fly around Mars; 1960 – interplanetary expedition complex (IEC) with human landing on Mars, Sergey Korolev, at OKB-1, now RSC Energia named after S.P. Korolev). None of the projects have been implemented.
However, Mikhail Burdaev, a test cosmonaut of the cosmonaut squad, declared his readiness to fly to Mars one-way back in the 70s and 80s. Pilot-cosmonaut Valery Polyakov was the first in the world to fly around the Earth for 437 days (1994-1995) to prepare for a “Martian” mission and dreamed of flying to Mars. In the USA in 1998, Robert Zubrin initiated the creation of the Mars Society (over 5,000 members, 6,000 participants in more than 50 countries). It is the world’s largest and most influential organization dedicated to the exploration and human settlement of the Red Planet.
In 2001, the European Space Agency adopted the Aurora program, with the ultimate goal of a manned expedition to Mars. In 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Prospects program, which aims to land humans on Mars in 2030-2040. A new IEC project for a flight to Mars has been developed in Russia, and the first Mars-500 experiment has been conducted to simulate a manned flight to Mars with international participation. The crew of six people “flew” for 520 days (2010-2011).
And on January 20, 2025, US President Donald Trump announced his intention to send astronauts to Mars. On March 17, 2025, the founder and CEO of SpaceX Corporation (USA), Elon Musk, announced that a person would set foot on Mars for the first time in five to seven years. A spacecraft with the humanoid robot Optimus will fly to Mars at the end of 2026.
The time has come to start preparing and implementing manned flights to Mars based on a “critical mass” of people, ideas, knowledge, technologies, and resources. But this requires solving a number of organizational and technological problems. It is necessary to ensure safety, including overcoming the most difficult “radiation barrier” and the associated risks. There is no certainty yet that this will happen at all, and even more so in the next five to seven years.
In Russia, it has not yet come to making the necessary decisions for the implementation of similar space projects. Meanwhile, we need the “Mars” project as a super-task for obtaining new knowledge, developing science and technology, new space and other technologies, training personnel, maintaining the status of a leading space power, exploring extraterrestrial resources, and international cooperation, taking into account our national interests. It is urgently necessary to develop and adopt an international agreement on manned flight to Mars (the main participants are the United States, Russia, and China), as well as an international agreement under the auspices of the United Nations “On the exploration of Mars.” Russia can initiate these agreements.
In today’s extremely complex and turbulent reality in the country and the world, it is necessary to receive support for the manned “Mars” project from the authorities and the Russian society. It won’t be easy to do that.
In addition, competition between manned and “automatic” directions in space exploration is growing in the Russian Federation. Enthusiasts and lobbyists for “drones” are increasingly crowding out and limiting expensive and risky manned deep space flights.
Instead of settling in space to escape from earthly and cosmic catastrophes (according to Tsiolkovsky), creating a space “Noah’s Ark”, a space man and humanity, once again “running on the spot for another 50 years” on the future new and “eternally alive” Russian orbital station (ROS) in near–Earth polar orbit.
And instead of Russia’s active manned exploration of the Moon and Mars, will astronauts fly only to the Russian Federation and carry out a new important mission within the framework of BRICS: to lift the African “virgin space” on Earth and near-Earth orbit? But this will further limit and slow down Russia’s development as a space power “tied” to Earth (with all due respect to the dreams of colleagues from African countries about manned flights).
Suggested: 1) to develop and adopt in 2025 the law of the Russian Federation “On the preparation and implementation of manned flights to Mars”; 2) to include the project of a manned expedition to Mars in the national project for the development of Russian space activities until 2030 and for the future until 2036; 3) to introduce the discipline “Exploration and development of Mars” in higher education for the training of specialists and scientific staff.
Yes, it is possible and necessary to cooperate with Elon Musk and the United States in the Mars project (such attempts are already being made by the Russian Federation). But the Americans are unlikely to allow Russia to participate on an equal basis, much less to lead in this project. A solution to this complex conflict remains to be found. At the same time, our priorities in ideas and technologies should be defended.
But first of all, we have to get out of the “near-Earth space hibernation” in manned flights and overcome the psychological barrier, want and be able to fly to Mars: create all the necessary and sufficient technologies and equipment, select and train new Russian cosmonauts.
