Word: moone
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Once your Mars ship is poised in space--either hovering at Lagrange point L1 or fresh off the surface of the moon--your next worry is the matter of in-space propulsion. Speed is everything on the way to Mars, and not only because a seven-month trip in a confined space can be torturous. The bigger problem is that it can also be lethal because of radiation exposure in deep space, where the absence of Earth's magnetic field leaves astronauts far more exposed to deadly cosmic energy than they are in orbit...
There's another concern, one that worries administrators more than engineers. If NASA history has proved anything, administrators say, it's that intermediate space goals can sometimes turn into ends in themselves. "We could easily get bogged down on the moon and never get to Mars, at least not in this century," warns Murray. That kind of long-term detour, says Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, is "the same swindle we fell for on the space station...
...what Mars planners are really after is a stable, low-gravity place where spacecraft could be assembled and missions could begin, they might do a lot better to fly out to Lagrange point L1--a spot about 200,000 miles from Earth where the gravity of Earth and moon are in relative equilibrium. Gravitational forces essentially cancel each other out at such cosmic odd spots, making them easier to leave than the low-gravity moon and entirely eliminating the need to ease hardware down to the surface and then wrestle it back off again...
...most recent--and possibly still unreliable--target date for the station's completion means six more years of money and labor poured into the seemingly endless project. With shuttle and station operations consuming about 40% of NASA's $15.5 billion annual budget, it's no wonder the President's moon-and-Mars plan calls for no new component to fly until 2014. It's only then that the real spending--perhaps $170 billion, according to NASA's estimates, and probably much more--could begin...
...what would it take to move the Bush proposal--or any other moon-and-Mars proposal--out of the blueprint stage and into space? For one thing, it would take a real commitment. Remember the national aerospace plane? No? Neither does anyone else, but this was one of the start-and-stop projects on which NASA lavished dead-end research dollars in the 1980s. "From 1961 to 1973," says Zubrin, "we had Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Mariner, Surveyor, and we developed almost all the space technology we have today. What did we accomplish in the '90s? We flew half...