HD images from Journey to Space documentary

Journey to Space is a 2015 3D documentary which "unveils a new era of unprecedented deep space exploration" presented by Boeing and Toyota. In the ending it features a good animation of NASA's Journey to Mars mission. Here are some HD quality screens of it.

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Video: NASA's Journey to Mars

In recent months NASA has released some exciting videos visualizing its "Journey to Mars". What is more important - they represent a conceptual shift from Apollo's style approach [every expedition to it's own location] to a more longsighted approach - every expedition to the same one location. At the workshop in October, 2015 NASA officials revealed that "human exploration of Mars is not planned as a single mission, but a series of three to five expeditions, each with a crew of four to six, lasting about 500 Martian days each. All would land in the same exploration zone, or EZ. The plan includes the construction of a surface field station to be located in the center of the exploration." It means that NASA's "Journey to Mars" mission concept has become more friendly to a goal of a permanent human colony on Mars.

NASA's base on Mars after a few decades:

5 spacecraft currently orbiting Mars

In a recent article "Traffic around Mars gets busy" the NASA/JPL summed up some facts about spacecraft currently orbiting Mars. The most interesting is the provided graphic of their orbits around Mars (together with planet's two natural satellites Phobos & Deimos):

So there are 5 active Mars orbiters currently orbiting the planet:

The Mars Underground, updated edition

The Mars Underground is a documentary about the dream to get to Mars.. about the disappointment of "space era" kids/youth for NASA not going further after the human landing on Moon on 1969. One of such kids was visionary rocket scientist, the president of The Mars Society Robert Zubrin who with his team has developed his own plan for getting humans to Mars and back - Mars Direct (with updated mission architecture called "Mars Semi-Direct"). They are confident the mission could be carried out in a decade if only NASA would dare to try. It would be the first step for colonizing Mars and thereby making humanity a multi-planet civilization.

As the documentary was released in May, 2007 it doesn't cover the more recent plans for Mars colonization/exploration by SpaceX.

You can watch the most recent version (labeled as "Updated edition/Director's cut") of the film here:

ISECG strategy for long-range human space exploration

The International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) is a forum of 14 most advanced government space agencies - ASI (Italy), CNES (France), CNSA (China), CSA (Canada), CSIRO (Australia), DLR (Germany), ESA (European Space Agency), ISRO (India), JAXA (Japan), KARI (Republic of Korea), NASA (United States of America), NSAU (Ukraine), Roscosmos (Russia), UKSA (United Kingdom). Its main goal is to advance a long-range human space exploration strategy.

On August, 2013 12 ISECG member agencies (including NASA) released the most recent update to the Global Exploration Roadmap. The summary can be seen in this infographic:

On April 10-11, 2014 NASA plans to host a workshop to discuss the updates to this roadmap.

Hope, the private pioneers like SpaceX, Mars One and others will speed up those plans a bit!