Word: apollos
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Even for a supposedly spacefaring people, dreaming of Mars is dreaming big. Back when Apollo astronauts were routinely bunny-hopping on the nearby moon, Mars seemed like an obvious next goal. But during the past 25 years, the best we've been able to muster has been a few unmanned Martian probes. After the two most recent ones famously flamed out, and after last week's scathing report blaming nasa mismanagement for the failures, even that seems beyond...
...reaching Mars is doing it smart and doing it cheap. In 1989, during the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, President Bush challenged NASA to figure out how to put human beings on Mars. The space agency came back with an elephantine 30-year plan that involved construction bays and fuel depots in low-Earth orbit and carried a jaw-dropping price tag of $450 billion...
Whichever approach is chosen, what all of them have in common is the speed with which they could be pulled off. Unlike the early Apollo planners, who weren't even sure they could get astronauts into near-Earth space, much less fling them out to the moon, Mars-mission directors have the basic space-travel technology down cold. All they need is the go-ahead to design and build their machines...
...ground are reconfigured engines cannibalized from the shuttle. The technology needed to distill the Martian atmosphere is the stuff of first-year chemistry texts. For this reason, Zubrin believes, Mars Direct could be surprisingly affordable: about $40 billion for five missions, or less than half the cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars...
...shelf parts may save money, but when it comes time to fly, they often fall short. At the Johnson Space Center, engineers are thus looking at other Mars scenarios that still include frugal, on-site fuel manufacturing but also call for six-person crews, bigger vehicles and Apollo-style motherships in Martian orbit. "We're trying to take the best ideas and fold them into a reasonable approach," says Drake...