How far we have actually got

Let's go to Mars is a non-profit record of how close humanity has actually got to Mars. It is built to answer one question first — where do we stand right now? — and it reads newest first, back through the rovers and the orbiters and the wrong turns, to the planet condensing out of the solar nebula 4.5 billion years ago.

There are currently 76 milestones across 9 eras, of which 4 have not happened yet and are marked accordingly.

Why it runs backwards

A conventional timeline starts at the beginning, which puts the most interesting part — the part that is still moving — at the bottom of a very long page. This one is inverted on purpose. The top is the present, and the slot above the present is deliberately empty: it is reserved for the entry nobody has been able to write yet, the one that says a human being is standing on the surface. Everything below it is the run-up to that entry.

The scale problem

A truthful linear axis is impossible here. If the 4.5 billion years since Mars formed were drawn to scale on a page tall enough to read, the entire history of human astronomy — Babylon to Perseverance — would occupy substantially less than one pixel.

So this timeline does not pretend. Every era is given roughly equal space, and the real elapsed time is printed on the divider you cross each time you drop into an older one. Inside an era, the gap between two entries also stretches the rail in proportion to the time that passed. The compression is stated rather than hidden, which is the only honest version of this page.

What counts as a milestone

Something datable that changed what was known, what was possible, or what people believed. That includes the failures — roughly half of all missions sent to Mars never worked — and it includes the wrong answers, because the canal era is a better story about how science actually goes than any of the successes are.

Anything that has not yet flown carries a label saying so, and is never presented as history. Dates that have slipped are described as having slipped.

Sources

Every entry carries its own sources, linked at the bottom of its page — mostly NASA, ESA, JPL, NSSDCA, journal papers and museum collections. Where a claim is disputed or has been walked back, the entry says so rather than picking the more exciting version. If you find an error, it is an error, and it should be fixed.

Credits

Images are credited individually on the entries that use them, and are drawn from public domain and institutional sources including NASA, ESA and the British Museum. The text is original.