A round trip to Mars - with our current technology - would take about two years: nine months to get there, three months of hangin' out, waiting for the relative positions of Mars and Earth to line up closely again, then another nine months back. Howe Industries, funded by NASA, is aiming to make a round trip closer to a seven-month sight-seeing journey with its Pulsed Plasma Rocket engine design. Mars can be as close as 34.7 million miles (55.8 million km) away or as far as 248.8 million miles (400.4 million km) away depending on where our two planets are in orbit around the sun.