Word: martian
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...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...
...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...
...behind it is. The spacecraft in which the astronauts will live are descendants of the same pressurized vessels NASA has been building since the Mercury days. The boosters that will lift the ships off the 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...
...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...
What's new about the future, and potentially more challenging to our species than Martian colonization or silicon brain implants, is that the partnership between the sexes is becoming entirely voluntary. We can decide to stick together--or we can finally say, "Sayonara, other sex!" For the first time in human history and prehistory combined, the choice will be ours...