NASA predicts people on Mars within 25 years

Washington, Nov 15: NASA has announced plans to have humans on Mars in 25 years, locking it into a space race with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The US space agency believes it can put humans on the Red Planet within 25 years, but the technological and medical hurdles are immense.

"The cost of solving those means that under current budgets, or slightly expanded budgets, it's going to take about 25 years to solve those," said former NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who flew on four space shuttle missions before retiring in 2001.

"We need to get started now on certain key technologies," he told reporters in Washington.

At an average distance of about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers), Mars poses scientific problems an order of magnitude greater than anything encountered by the Apollo lunar missions.