It's not really the trip that worries me, it's living on Mars. You need to live under five meters of soil in order to get the same radiation protection as Earth's atmosphere provides. You're basically mole people. Which means the difference between living on Mars and living in windowless apartment complex on Earth is that you can do a couple space suit jaunts through the Martian deserts each week.

People can definitely survive living almost entirely indoors. I expect VR will be big on Mars. But I think the lack of natural light will really limit the comfort level.

If someone can invent an invisible electromagnetic radiation shield that would change the game.

Artificial light isn't the best, but it can be made to resemble daylight; I don't see that as a show-stopper.

If we can find some nice lava tubes that can be sealed and pressurized, it might make for some rather spacious dwellings. But yes, I expect the first Martians to effectively be mole people.

I imagine living on Mars would be a lot like living in a place like Whittier Alaska [1] (a town where everyone lives in the same building). Not for everyone, but some people might like it.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/01/18/378162264/welcome-to-whittier-...

Sounds like a recipe for madness, suicide, and homicide to me, especially given the lack of escape.

Is EM radiation that can't be blocked by sheets of metal really an important problem? It looks like we can use magnetic fields to block charged particles and apparently that's good enough for space travel - but perhaps not for a person's whole life.

http://www.sr2s.eu/project-news/19-eu-space-project-will-all...

Sheets of metal have a lot of issues, unless you bring hugely THICK sheets of dense metals. All you do with thinner shielding is turn your alpha/beta risk into a re-radiated gamma risk. Plus, dense shielding is heavy... and therefore expensive in terms of its Delta-v.

Going outside routinely is dangerous on Mars. It takes a penny sized hole in your suit and you're dead.

I doubt that's the case. Suits will be tough, and undoubtedly come with patch kits, and folks will use the buddy system.

A penny-sized hole would give time to patch, and suits would likely be designed to compartmentalize in a leak. In a true worst-case scenario, chimp studies in the 1970s showed they could survive several minutes of total vacuum.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space...

How long a human would survive is one thing. How much medical care they'd need is another. They'd be on Mars, not Earth, and I imagine being a quadruple amputee on Mars would effectively be a death sentence.

Musk's plan is to have ships going back and forth every launch window. I'd expect anyone disabled like that to be offered a trip home.

I'll believe that when I see it.

And as missions become routine, costs drop, and dangers become well-known all of these things will only improve. The biggest obstacle to making space travel more human-friendly is that practically no humans are traveling through space. Change that part of the equation and the rest is downhill.

It's easy to talk about sacrificing people for the sake of progress, but it's still barbaric.