Word: spacecrafts
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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...
...years later, when Mars and Earth are again in conjunction, another spacecraft--this one carrying a crew--would be sent to join the robot ship on the surface. The astronauts could work on Mars for 18 months, living principally in their arrival craft, and then, at the end of their stay, abandon that ship, climb into the robot craft and blast off for home. "Fly several of these missions," says Robert Zubrin, author of the book The Case for Mars and one of the engineers who developed the plan, "and you leave the surface scattered with a series of warming...
What makes the Mars Direct plan remarkable is how unremarkable the science 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...
What to do if an Earth-bound comet or asteroid is discovered? Early detection, preferably many years in advance, would enable us to send out exploratory spacecraft to determine the nature of the interloper, much like the spacecraft near's current investigation of the asteroid Eros. Scientists at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories are already dreaming up a variety of ingenious defenses against an incoming asteroid. Depending on its mass and composition, they would use tailor-made nuclear explosions to pulverize a small asteroid or deflect a larger one. Given enough time, and under the proper circumstances...