Landing men on Watch Lost Bullet Onlinethe moon wasn't easy.

We remember the famous first step, the inspiring words and the flag. What many people don't remember is that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin overshot their landing zone. With the seconds ticking away, they were nearly forced to abort the mission.

Mars, a six-episode miniseries that premieres Monday night on the National Geographic Channel, wants to remind you that amazing feats of engineering and bravery don't come easy.

"It was pretty hairy," Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, told Mashable about the Apollo 11 landing, until Armstrong “put it down like a plate of eggs."

This series -- produced by Ron Howard and adapted from Stephen Petranek's book How We'll Live on Mars -- starts with the international crew of the Daedalus making a rough landing far from where they were supposed to touch down.

From there, they have to make their way toward base camp, sent to the Red Planet beforehand and set up by autonomous systems. Everything in the show was meant to be realistic, from the private space company that launches the rocket to the MOXIE device that provides air for the colonists.

A real MOXIE instrument will be installed on the Mars 2020 rover. Hopefully, the experiment will show that we can create breathable air for humans and liquid oxygen for launching rockets. It doesn't take a huge mental leap to imagine something similar in a future Mars colony.

"What we did in the show was scale it up a little," Robert Braun, an aerospace engineer who worked for NASA, told Mashable.He consulted on the show, helping the writers with technical details and ideas. (The series also serves as a documentary, the drama is spliced with interviews with experts like Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX.)

"They really tried to get it right," Braun said. The colonists on the show also use an advanced version of a WAVAR machine -- first theorized by scientists at the University of Washington in the 1990s -- to extract humidity from the air and a 3D printer to repurpose Martian soil for building materials.

"It's not like we have to invent brand-new technologies," he said. "The technologies that we need, we know what they are -- we're working on them now."

Another new development explored in the film: using retro rockets to land a spacecraft vertically, as opposed to using parachutes, as NASA did when it put Curiosity on the planet in 2012.

Said Zubrin: "If they had shown me this movie three years ago and asked, 'What do you think about how they landed on Mars?' I would have said, 'That's great Hollywood stuff, but that's not how we're going to do it.'"

Now, SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of multiple Falcon 9 rockets on Earth. (Rockets traveling to Mars will be much bigger and be going much faster, so we're not there yet. Still, the basic concept is the same.)

That makes Zubrin, Braun and Petranek all optimistic that human beings could, like on the show, land on Mars by 2033.

After all, President John F. Kennedy made his famous moon speech in 1962. Only seven years later, astronauts were walking on the lunar surface.

"Even though Mars is much farther than the moon, from a technical point of view, we are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1962," Zubrin said.

While there are plenty of technical challenges that still need to be solved, many of the barriers to landing on Mars are related to politics, logistics and money. It will likely to take several countries and private companies working together to make this happen, along with an appetite for risk.

"Frankly, we could do it by 2024," Zubrin said. "If Donald Trump is serious about making America great again, he should say he’s going to land on Mars by 2024."