massivepickle

There's an outer space treaty that says that basically says that you own the land you're currently using.

It's obviously more complicated than that, but if you start a colony on Mars, or an asteroid, or the Moon, nobody is going to kick out off of it.

Edit: Also considering that Mars has approximately the same land surface area as Earth, I doubt there will be any conflicts on Mars over property for man, many decades.

Okay, so at this point in time it appears that the biggest challenge for a human mission to Mars is creating a Mars Ascent Veichle (MAV), that is also capable of entry, descent and landing (EDL) on Mars.

Now, so far the biggest thing we've managed to land on Mars is a 900kg rover, a fraction of the mass of any required ascent veichle. The low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) may be good for landing crew and crew habitats, but I doubt it would work for something as large as a (MAV).

So my question is this, is there any work in progress yet on the monumental task that is designing an (EDL) system for the (MAV), or the (MAV) in general? And what other ideas do you guys have for landing large payloads on Mars, other than (LDSD) and propulsive landing?

Will you guys continue to capture data from the falcon9 boost back retro-propulsion for upcoming CRS missions?

Referring to when you guys did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UFjK_CFKgA

Seems like a valuable source of data for high velocity retro propulsion in a low pressure environment.