Word: fuel
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...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...
What drove up the cost of the project was the size of the spacecraft needed to reach Mars, and what drove up the size of the spacecraft was all the fuel and other consumables it would need to carry with it on so long a trip. But while Mars is indeed remote--at its farthest it's 1,000 times as distant as the moon--it has a lot of things the moon doesn't, most notably an atmosphere. And that makes all the difference...
...early as 2005, when Earth and Mars are in their once-every-26-months alignment, the plan envisions launching a four-person spacecraft to Mars--but launching it with its tanks empty of fuel and its cabin empty of crew. Landing on the surface, the craft would begin pumping Martian atmosphere--which is 95% carbon dioxide--into a reaction chamber, where it would be exposed to hydrogen and broken down into methane, water and oxygen. Methane and oxygen make a first-rate rocket fuel; water and oxygen are necessary human fuels. All these consumables could be pumped into tanks inside...
...failures of NASA's unmanned Mars probes suggest, makeshift machines built with off-the-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...
...this, the third installment of TIME's 100 questions for the 21st century, we focus on the great unsolved riddles of space and time and human consciousness. Our journey is necessarily brief--we don't have enough fuel to travel more than 25 years or so into the future. But our guides are patient and remarkably lucid. We come back excited by how much can be foretold--about cloning, evolution, earthquakes and space travel--and humbled by how much is yet unknown...