Is this the right way to Mars?

Soviet helmets bought on eBay, homemade spacesuits – there’s a growing DIY space movement, from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to part-time professors working on their own missions to Mars. Could they really beat Nasa in the race to the red planet?
Alina Simone
The Times
University professor Cameron Smith, in Portland, Oregon, wearing his homemade spacesuit, which he will test himself by jumping from a hot-air balloon at 65,000ft – more than twice the height of Everest
University professor Cameron Smith, in Portland, Oregon, wearing his homemade spacesuit, which he will test himself by jumping from a hot-air balloon at 65,000ft – more than twice the height of Everest
JOSE MANDOJANA
Alina Simone
The Times

Tina Sjogren remembers exactly where she was when she told her husband, Tom, that she wanted to go to Mars: the whirlpool on the patio of the Sheraton Gateway Hotel. She gazed up at the stars and said, “I want to go up there so bad!” Then Tina, one of the first women to ski to the North Pole, started crying like a child.

It was May 2006, and the Sjogrens had been invited to Los Angeles to write about the annual International Space Development Conference for ExplorersWeb, the online news site they had founded together in 2000 to cover the world of extreme adventure. The hotel was full of space celebrities, including Apollo moonwalker Buzz Aldrin and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The Sjogrens were