I think this quote sums up the monumental difficulties nicely: You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot t

I think this quote sums up the monumental difficulties nicely: You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate. By now, a lot of individual problems needing to be solved for a Mars mission have sound solutions! But taken in aggregate, it's unbelievable to me that one could simply believe we're ready. We've done life support in LEO for decades, we can use Mars' nitrogen-rich atmosphere, we can pack a bunch of rockets with supplies! Yes we did and yes we could and yes we very well may! But, as the article makes clear, the engineering challenge ahead isn't in having all the puzzle pieces flipped right-side up, it's in putting the thing together and keeping it together during a wind storm.