"The stairs of the sky are let down for him that he may ascend thereon to heaven. O gods, put your arms under the king: raise him lift him to the sky. To the sky! To the sky!" --Hymn for a dead Pharaoh--

Space Art Gallery Mars spacecraft constructed in Earth orbit. Powered by nuclear fission reactors. Reactors will power thermal ion engines. Running the engines for a few hours will increase the velocity of spacecraft to about one hundred thousand miles per hour. Two crew compartments on spinning truss assembly to create gravity. Once the space craft is put into Mars orbit through a combitation of slowing down via main engine firing and aero braking the space craft will stay in orbit around Mars. While in orbit the craft will continue to spin to create artificial gravity. The gravity on Mars is one third the gravity of earth. The orbiting craft will serve as a gravity rehab for the crew working on the surface. The two landers docked to the crew modules of the space craft will act as shuttles. Above image depicts Mars space craft with spherical halo showing magnetic field. The magnetic field would be generated by the nuclear reactors or with permanent magnets, nano super conducting magnets. The magnetic field might be amplified with a liquid metal core like the Earths, in this case liquid sodium. The liquid sodium could also be the coolant for the nuclear reactors. With the crew modules surounded by a magnetic field the crews exposure to cosmic radiation and radiation from solar flares would be decreased. Also the space craft hull could be constructed of nano tube carbon fibers inpregnated with hydrogen. Hydrogen being a very good absorber of a lot of ionic radiations. Cosmic radiation is mostly ionic radiation. Above image of Anti dark matter space craft is very much a science fiction creation. Something like 70 per cent of the universe is unknown including matter that we at this time don't understand. Something is making the universe expand at an ever increasing rate. Maybe it's anti energy of some kind or maybe a fundamental law of physics that we don't see because of our extremely narrow window of experience. The farthest out a scientific instrument of ours as voyaged is about 9 billions miles. Scientists are not yet in agreement that the instrument as even left the solar system. All images created by Mark Somers using the Pov Ray Ray Tracing program.