From an economic capacity and technological perspective, we absolutely could build a vessel that had enough radiation shielding and thrust to get some people th

From an economic capacity and technological perspective, we absolutely could build a vessel that had enough radiation shielding and thrust to get some people there (and probably even back). No need for a 1,000 day time frame. That's not enough to ensure the health and safety of the crew of course, but "marginal" is different than "ensure". Of course that isn't politically possible, but the other poster seemed to be talking about our capacity as a civilization in their comment, and really, the NASA outline presented in the article doesn't do much more to demonstrate it than my silly mission above. The "interesting" level for a civilization would be to build an actual self sustaining colony on Mars, and we probably don't currently have the capacity to do that (the challenges go from having the equipment needed to being able to manufacture it).