The Ares Plan

<Shocking! America's Ares Plan launches—and its target is Mars!>

In the office at the end of the corridor in Jinling University's School of Mathematics.

Lu Zhou was sitting at his desk, drinking coffee and browsing the web, when he happened to see that headline.

After searching for the original article on an overseas website and reading it through, he shook his head with a smile.

"Looks like the Americans couldn't sit still anymore either."

According to the report, NASA would launch the Ares Mars Colonization Plan within the year. Through public bidding, it would divide the entire project into several subprojects and award them to Space-X, Blue Origin, and other aerospace companies from the United States and its allies. It would also recruit volunteers from around the world.

According to the information already disclosed, the entire plan would consist of three phases. The first would involve delivering life-support equipment to the surface of Mars.

Once the life-support equipment was confirmed to be functioning properly, the second phase of launches would begin.

That meant sending a crewed spacecraft to Mars, carrying two or three colonists to the "New World" to prepare for the subsequent colonization effort.

From Lu Zhou's perspective, NASA's sudden announcement of such a plan was undoubtedly somewhat rushed. What surprised him most was that Congress had approved its budget so quickly.

Still, surprising as it was, he could understand why things had turned out this way.

The series of policies Hua Nation had introduced in the aerospace sector, along with the technological leap achieved by the Auspicious through electric propulsion, had struck America's most sensitive nerve.

In particular, the Spark Plan and the crewed Moon Landing Program scheduled to begin in mid-February had not only shown the White House Hua Nation's determination to develop outer-space resources, but also