Roughing It on the Red Planet |
Charged by the first President Bush with developing a plan for exploring Mars, NASA did its notorious 90-Day Study. The cost of this bold exploratory endeavor? Merely 450 billion dollars. Robert Zubrin came up with a better idea: Living off the land.
Better still was the fact that when he briefed the folks at NASA-JSC, they listened.
The key to Zubrin's plan is an elegantly simple idea — making rocket fuel from the atmosphere of Mars. Make enough for the return trip, and the ship only has to carry half the fuel it otherwise would. This reduces the size and weight of the ship by a whole bunch. Make the fuel with a completely automated system that you send ahead of the human explorers, and you can be sure it's worked before you send them.
The devil, of course, is in the details. Doctor Zubrin explains those details in this well-written book.
| THE CASE FOR MARS |
| Robert Zubrin New York: The Free Press, 1996 |
| ISBN 0-684-82757-3 |
This image shows the cover of the revised edition.
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