text: exactly how long does it take to reach mars? i just was wondering because im reading a book, and it says that it only took 1 month to get there. im curious because it is just a fiction book and i know it isn't true. plz help me it all depends how fast you travel! mars is 35 million miles away from earth at its closest approach, so you would need a very fast method of transport to cover that distance in an acceptable period of time. current technology puts the travel time at something like 6-12 months, but the time for the whole journey there and back would be about 2-3 years as you would have to wait on mars for a year until the earth was close enough.  hopefully in the not-to-distant future, new forms of spaceship might cut this journey time down considerably to perhaps just a couple of months.