As incredible as this footage is, it's even more mindblowing to realize we've been doing this for 50 years now. We know how to land on mars. Time to do it with people.
This method has been used twice, it is nowhere near human rated, hence why its called the 7 minutes of terror. For all the engineering, it has to be perfect or splat
But you don't have to worry that much about kicking up a lot of dust (the self-loading meatbags on board can clean your solar panels) so you can just point your thrusters at the ground and play with the throttle a little
It's not just the landing, that's relatively simple and can be mostly done with bigger thrusters on the craft but you have to slow down a lot before you can safely. Right now that's done through a heat shield then a parachute and finally the actual propulsive landing of the SkyCrane. We've done some testing of inflatable shields for the first step but nothing practiced actually in the Martian atmosphere yet and parachutes aren't great for heavier things.
You want to use the other two to slow down as much as possible so you're not hauling extra fuel all the way to Mars. Ideally you'd be using ISRU units to generate your return fuel too.
I agree we should send people as soon as reasonable, but this system is deploying about 1 ton of payload, which isn't going to go very far in terms of life-support equipment (dried rations, maybe... air scrubbers? No.)
Whats the point of doing it with humans.
Robots are getting better every year. Humans not really.
Robots will most likely first build an settlement on mars before humans will arrive.
