Close Over five decades after humans were sent to the moon, the nearest celestial body to Earth, the original plan remains: to go to Mars. It is something a lot of astronauts who have gone to space thought should have already been accomplished. In December 2019, the first African American woman in space, Mae Jemison, told university students at the Kennedy Space Center for Complex she just assumed, by the time she got to be "old enough to go into the space program, you know we'd be living on Mars," or she'd be working on the Red Planet just as a scientist.