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How Close are We to a Real-life Mars Mission, À La 'The Martian'?

It's no secret that NASA wants to get humans to Mars. At the moment, the space agency's guiding star is the dream of landing people on the red planet sometime in the not-too-distant future. But Hollywood already has them beat. In The Martian, Matt Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney, a NASA botanist who gets left behind on Mars after a dust storm forces the rest of his crew to leave the planet. In the film, Watney and his five crewmates were brought to Mars by a huge rotating spaceship called the Hermes, which was built in low-Earth orbit using a space station backed by the real-life private company SpaceX. So, just how different will NASA's real mission to Mars be? "By the 2030s, we want a human presence in that area [Mars], perhaps a flyby like we did to the moon... or perhaps going to Phobos and Deimos, which are two moons of Mars," Jim Green, NASA director of the planetary science division, tells Mashable. Green added that the current plan is to get "boots on the ground" by the 2040s or 2050s, according to the strategy President Barack Obama has laid out for the agency.