We already have men spending months on the international space station, which is, in part, a test to see how man deals with long periods in space. The travel time wouldn't be that much different than time on ISS. If you can survive months in spaces as small as that, then you can survive months in a traveling spacecraft, right?<br/><br/>The ship itself would have to be huge to supply the crew for 15 months of travel, plus whatever time they spent on mars, say 6 months to make the trip worth the effort. You don't spend all of the time in space suits or capsules and in theory, the living habitat would be large enough to at least make moveing around without a suit possible... as we have seen with the now decommissioned space shuttles, it doesn't take a lot of space, just a certain personality.<br/><br/>In my own opinion, we'll have to establish a perminant presence on the moon before we can move on to a perminant structure on Mars. Luna offers us nearly all of the conditions, at more extremes, that we'll have to face on Mars and the ability to learn how to extract everything that we need from the resources available.<br/><br/>A little known item of interest. The Moon has both water and oxygen (plus the trace elements) in abundance... we just have to figure out how to extract it from the rocks where it's at.... and no, I'm not talking about little bubbles of air in the gravel... The necessary elements to produce said materials are there.<br/><br/>And just imagine mining the moons of Mars! Love it!<br/><br/>In the time Magazine article I recall from all those years ago, terriforming Mars would be an unmanned process for well over 50 years; seeding alji to produce atmosphereic elements, factories to produce green house gases to raise the temperature and thicken the atmosphere, eventually more advanced plantlife to increase air production and remove carbon dioxice from the air and another 50 years or so of first space suits, then breathers before being able to run about  on the red tinged grass and visit Mount Alien Face... *grins* I realy need to see if the article is out there anywhere...