Education Paths to Mars
Formal degrees, trade programs, and entrepreneurship tracks — every path that leads to the Red Planet.
Getting humanity to Mars will take far more than astronauts. Behind every crew that eventually walks on the Red Planet stands an enormous workforce: the aerospace engineers who design the spacecraft, the geologists who choose landing sites, the physicians who keep crews alive, the welders and electricians who build and maintain habitats, and the entrepreneurs who finance and commercialize the whole endeavor. The path to Mars runs through classrooms, trade schools, and startups long before it reaches the launch pad.
This section maps those paths. Whether your route is a four-year engineering degree, a vocational certificate in a hands-on trade, or a venture in the growing commercial space sector, there is a place for it in the effort to reach Mars. The challenges of building a colony — producing air and water, growing food, generating power, shielding against radiation — are fundamentally problems of applied science and skilled labor. They demand not just theoretical knowledge but practical, buildable expertise.
Explore the fields of study below to see which disciplines feed most directly into Mars-related careers, along with the schools that offer them and the trade and entrepreneurship tracks that provide alternative routes. Each field connects to real work already underway across the space industry — the same disciplines behind the robotic missions exploring Mars today and the human missions being planned for tomorrow. For the specific roles these studies lead to, see our careers overview.