I’m going to bitch about the winter beating back the German.

The German had to stop their offensive in part because of winter, as the logistic network was too long and overcapacity to effectively bring winter gear up to the front.

But that’s only part of it, the issue. The biggest issue is, the German army was just out of steam by December 1941. They had been fighting nearly non stop since March, 1st in Yugoslavia and Greece and then in the USSR with very little time to recover. The fighting in the USSR had been very costly in men, and the drive itself had left the tanks and trucks running ragged. The Germans needed to use the winter to bring up fresh troops, equipment and munition for large scale offensive in spring 1942.

Also there is probably something to be say about diminishing the achievement of Soviet Generals like Konev and Zhukov but I am too sleepy to finish my comment.

The Earth to Mars flight time is closer to 6 months, something humans have done before on the ISS. The Constellation program planned for astronauts to spend 500 days on Mars to conduct scientific experimentation.

And the fuel for a return trip would be created locally by In Situ Resources Utilisation which is a bit of a NASA wet dream but not completely unrealistic. Considering all you need is H2 and O2 that can be hydrolyzed from water ice on the Mars surface.

But yeah won’t happen anytime soon

Mars is very much within our reach in terms of technology. If you look are the Constellation program from the early 2000, there was a clear and feasible plan for a Mars and back crewed mission by the 2030s. And it was cancelled and instead we got a somehow more expensive less ambitious Artemis program.

I hate Artemis, I hate the SLS it’s literally just fucking 1970s shuttle hardware with a centaur upper stage added to it. Yet they can’t even make it right. It’s stupidly expensive. It was always going to be stupid expensive because RS-25 engines are meant to be reused not single use. It’s unsafe because NASA is an organization that constantly forgets lesons in safety every 10 years. Because the entire Artemis program is just Congress’ excuse to give money to private space companies.