With Curiosity on Mars is it time to look at sending people?
Summary:The people behind the Skylon reusable spaceplane have
come up with an intriguing concept mission — and it involves
putting teams of people on the Red Planet.  Curiosity may have
killed the flat cat, but sometimes there are ideas that refuse
to die. One of them is Skylon, the British reusable spaceplane
concept that grew out of the ashes of British Aerospace's HOTOL
project.  Built around designer Alan Bond's SABRE air-breathing
rocket engine, Skylon is intended to be a single-stage-to-orbit
spaceplane that takes off and lands like a normal aircraft — but
with a cargo capacity of 15 tonnes to a 300km orbit. It's like
something out of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, a massive
aircraft taking container-loads to space.  An impression of a
Skylon spaceplane taking off powered by SABRE rockets. Photo:
Reaction Engines  But Skylon isn't the only thing that the folk
at Reaction Engines are thinking about.  If you can get
equipment into orbit cheaply