The United States government and a few American companies have established programs to send astronauts to Mars. Former U.S. President Barack Obama and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have both declared that astronauts would walk on the planet in just a few decades. China is joining the U.S. and Russia in space with its own Mars program. And aerospace companies like Blue Origin have published plans for future bases, ships and spacesuits. Last week’s successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket “puts us in a completely different realm of what we can put into deep space,” says Kartik Kumar. He is an analog astronaut. Analog astronauts carry out tests in preparation for a Mars space flight. The next step after the rocket test, Kumar says, is to deal with non-engineering problems, such as how to react to a medical emergency in space.