Martians know better than anyone that packing up your belongings and moving a quarter billion miles away is a hard sell, which is why they have tried their damnedest to make the process of getting there as painless as it can be. If you fancy yourself a future Martian, you have three main options to pick from.

The cheapest and most prevalent is to board an Aldrin cycler. These sleeping giants sail on an orbit that brings them past Earth and Mars once a year; to the red planet one year, the blue the next. Twelve clusters of them spin around the sun, so you shouldn’t have to wait any longer than two months or thereabouts.

To get on, first you’ll head to your closest spaceport. That’ll be Cape Canaveral if you’re in the U.S., Trivandrum if you’re in India, and Ki­li­mnaan­garo if you’re in East­africa.¹ You’ll be herded into a cramped capsule with a rollercoaster-style seat and blasted into space, where you’ll dock with one of the dozens of orbital ports scattered around the equator.

Now begins the wait. Don’t call it a quarantine — think of it as a place to breathe, relax, and take one last look at that lovely lush world you’re abandoning for a sterile quarry! For fourteen days, you’ll be given a place to sleep, exercise, and adjust to the low-gravity environment as best you can. (You’d better hope that’s “very well”, because you’ll be spending the rest of your life in it.)

After two weeks in space, you will, God willing, get a slip under your door from the doctors giving you the final all-clear. It’s time to board. You go through the same rigamarole with the capsules and the seats — though without aerodynamics to worry about, you’re not constantly bumping your head on the sloped sides — and might even catch a glimpse of the cycler’s lumbering wheels and spokes.

The Andromeda Pearl² is a great, hulking beast. It has to be: you and ten thousand other people will have nothing else for 145 days. There are no refills, no phone calls home six of seven days of the week, and noöne to bury you if you don’t make it all the way. Everything is provided for, just enough: luxurious, gourmet, twelve-hundred-calorie meals; pool tables with balls that almost float away; perfectly-fitting earbuds to block out your neighbours across the millimetre-thick wall; and films enough to watch for two years straight (on the flattest flat-screen TV aurei can buy).

Just you wait — in half a year’s time, when gourmet gives way to tinned to hydrated, and next door is too bored to have anything to argue about, and you’re on your sixth marathon of a seventy-year-old sitcom, you’ll walk onto the Martian surface, and into your brand new beautiful home.

That’s one way to do it, at least. Let’s say you’re impatient. Impulsive. You’ve made your mind up — you’re going to Mars, and you’re going now, and preferably without ten thousand churls who don’t even speak Kirundi. Might i suggest a charter flight?

Charter flights are rare and expensive, with only two companies willing to provide them, and for good reason: where the cyclers coast by on nothing but their own inertia, a charter scramjet needs fuel. Lots of it. Expensive, expensive fuel. And you’re paying for it. Expect prices from the high hundred thousands up to millions of dollars, and pray for a pilot with the patience of a saint. The trip can take anywhere from ninety days to over a year, depending on how the stars align when you set out — but you’ll be safe in the knowledge that it’s your trip, on your terms.

God — ninety days‽ What are you going to do for that long? It’d drive anyone mad! Imagine if you could just close your eyes in Earth orbit, and wake up on Mars, like nothing had happened at all… well, you’re in luck. If you’re willing to be a guinea pig (a very dextrous guinea pig who can sign a lot of waivers), you can try your hand at a sleeper ship.

Sleeper ships, usually found tailing behind in the shadow of an Aldrin cycler, do just what they say on the tin: place the passengers in an artificially induced coma for most of the trip. They advertise themselves with promises of “the future of transport” and sleek photoshoots of attendants in nineteen-sixties jumpsuits. What they don’t show is the passengers.

Being in a coma sucks. This is an immutable truth which even the most conniving ad man in the world cannot do anything about. Coma patients have tubes sticking out of them, and they shit themselves, and even under Earth’s suffocating gravitational hold their muscles will waste away and turn from tenderloin to jerky. It is much the same on board a sleeper ship, and that is why, if you look at the small print on the advert, you will find a tiny little asterisk next to the words “SLEEPER SHIP”. Here is what it says: “Although we do try very hard to keep your muscles in decent shape by electrically shocking them and hoping for the best, we will, once every month, wake you from your lovely comfy sleep and make you run on a treadmill with the wires still on like a monkey in a laboratory.”

Sleeper ship passengers often need intense physiotherapy upon arrival. Two per cent will die in transit. But ask the other ninety-eight, and they wouldn’t have come any other way.