Now that Curiosity has safely landed on Mars and begun wandering the planet's surface, we can finally ask the question: when do we get to go to Mars? Wired points out that NASA and other groups have come up with over a thousand detailed plans to send people to the red planet since the 1950s, and quite obviously, not one has come to fruition. Some of these ideas were incredibly outlandish, like Thomas Paine's overly ambitious 1984 report that planned to put nuclear space tugs and reusable space shuttles on the moon, in addition to several manned space stations in Earth's orbit. Paine's plan, as pictured in the diagram above, would have required 20 Saturn V launches per year (at $500 million each) and intended to send ships that were no longer reusable to build infrastructure on Mars. Most of the other plans were considerably more realistic, and are definitely worth reading about in Wired's full article.