Mars has received considerable attention in the past few decades, thanks to the many robotic missions exploring it to learn more about its past. NASA and China plan to send astronauts/taikonauts there in the coming decades, and commercial space companies like SpaceX hope to send passengers there sooner. This presents several significant challenges, one of the greatest being the lengthy transit times involved. Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes six to nine months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars.