Seventeen-year-old Alyssa Carson wants to be the first human to go to Mars

Cross your heart and hope to die, and tell us if you haven’t once thought as a child to grow up and become an astronaut. Most of us have, but either some of us didn’t qualify or a lot of us just dropped the idea mid-way. However, if those wishes for you still exist, you are going to be very envious of 17-year-old Alyssa Carson, who is on her way to become the first human to travel to Mars. In an interview with Teen Vogue Carson said, “I did the same thing as other kids, like switching my mind about careers, wanting to be a teacher or the president one day. But the way I always thought about it was I would become an astronaut, go to Mars, come back, and then be a teacher or the president.” via GIPHY While this actually sounds like she will be off to the space tomorrow, Carson is yet to go under a lot of professional training and the means to carry a human to space is also not quite ready yet. Which is why this trip to Mars is scheduled for 2033. via GIPHY This means she will be 32 when she on board her flight to the Red Planet. But before you go about thinking why her, well Carson has been in training for this mission for a while now. She can’t officially be a **NASA** astronaut until she’s 18. But NASA has given her a codename anyway; she’s called Blueberry.

Carson also told ABC 7 News that she had first developed an interest in space when she was a 3-year-old. This was sparked by a show on the Nickelodeon channel called ‘The Backyardigans’. In one of its episodes, the five animal characters go to a trip to a red planet. This triggered her curiosity about the Red Planet and Carson went all out in finding out everything there was to discovered about Mars. She said that since watching that show, her ambition of going to space has never left her sight. When she was 7, a trip with her father to a space camp in Alabama, further cemented her resolve. By 12, Carson was the first person to have attended all three NASA space camps in Alabama, Canada and Turkey. When asked what she is hoping to achieve by going to Mars, Carson responded that she was more interested in Astrobiology, and she will work as a research scientists looking at the water samples that have already been found on Mars by the rovers. “We will be going deeper to find any signs of bacterial life. We will also be taking soil sample and try to uncover the history of Mars,” said Carson. You can catch the full interview here.