What a Time to Be Alive: NASA Says They Could Have People on Mars in Less Than 20 Years

Assuming you're not overwhelmed by both Jon Hamm's Emmy win and Drake's historical team-up with Future, here's some more news to properly send your Monday into the stratosphere. NASA is again speaking quite confidently about the future of mankind's admittedly complicated relationship with Earth's elusive cousin Mars.

"We are farther down the path to sending humans to Mars than at any point in NASA's history," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said at a recent NASA event, according to the Huffington Post. "We have a lot of work to do to get humans to Mars, but we'll get there." Bolden also confirms that preparations for the Red Planet's inaugural manned mission are moving forward as anticipated, with the first human foot expected to touch the planet's surface as soon as 2030.

"We're going to make oxygen on another planet, the first time ever to make oxygen on another planet," NASA's deputy administrator Dava Newman says of the next Mars rover mission's initiation of the Mars Oxygen ISRU experiment. "These experiments, they're real. They're here." As always, the chief hurdle in need of crossing is securing the funds needed to make these futuristic leaps a certainty.

Pay up!