NASA's Maven mission to Mars is symptomatic of the global effort to put humans there—ambitious, but constrained by tight funding that demands international collaboration to cover costs.
Increasingly, former competitors in the space arena are accepting cooperation as the only way humans will ever reach Mars, and are willing to drop short-term gain for long-term success.
“We should take the best stuff available on the Earth,” says Vitaly Lopota, president and general designer of Russia's RSC Energia, which builds all of Russia's human-spaceflight hardware. “Beyond Earth, in deep space, we will be on the same route, and we should jointly implement it.”
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