Mars Direct-A Cost Effective Proposal, by Brandon Cratty

My job for the project was to research how such a large intergovernmental project would be financed. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been numerous proposals for manned missions to Mars, each with widely varying concepts and budget proposals. One such mission, named Mars Direct, is a cost effective proposal put forth by Robert Zubrin and David Baker in their series of conferences at the University of Boulder Colorado. Since NASA has taken Mars Direct into consideration as a possible mission model, I thought I would talk briefly about a predecessor proposal named SEI and its failings and lead that into the Mars Direct Mission and how it offers a cheaper, safer, and quicker alternative to some of the 100 billion dollar Mars Orbiting missions proposed by NASA.


In July of 1989 then President George H.W Bush announced a prolonged plan deemed the Space Exploration Initiative. The project, which would have comprised of building Space Station Freedom, a Lunar Base, and sending a manned mission to Mars, would surely have been a monumental task. It would have required permanently manned space stations on both the moon and the Earth’s orbit, a complete revolution in the size, construction and function of spacecraft, and not to mention lots and lots of money.

Unfortunately, President Bush was at the time unaware of the cost estimates of such an endeavor before he announced SEI’s plans to the public. In August of 1990, after hearing NASA’s estimated 400 billion dollar price tag over three decades, Bush established a committee to encourage NASA to focus mainly on Earth Science. In 1996, SEI was scrapped altogether in the Clinton Administration’s National Space Policy and Space Exploration was officially removed from the National Agenda.

In the same year, a series of conferences at the University of Boulder Colorado between 1981 and 1996 and was condensed into a book by Robert Zubrin, called The Case for Mars. The book advocates for return to the days of frontier exploration being at the top of the agenda. He recalls the adventures of Lewis and Clark and Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the North and South poles, and that the key ingredient in groundbreaking expeditions is the fact that these explorers thrived and survived by “Living off the Land”. This is what Zubrin believes to be the essential tactic if we are to ever successfully explore and colonize Mars. He says that it would have been completely irrational unfeasible for Lewis and Clark to bring along all of their necessary food and supplies for their three year trip across the continent. And that Sir John Franklin, an explorer and idol to his successor Amundsen, failed in his attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage because he brought with him a huge ship stocked with an abundance of unnecessary supplies. Zubrin asserts that in the entire history of Frontier exploration, it has always been large party, large budget expeditions that fail, and the small crew, small budget survivalist groups that continually succeed. He argues that space should be no different, and that programs like SEI will always be doomed to fail.

The spacecrafts used to get to Mars would be non orbiting, and as self-sufficient as possible. The first shuttle to be launched roughly two years before the manned launch, would be called the "Earth Return Vehicle", or (ERV) and would be sent directly from Earth's surface to Mars using essentially the same technology that is used today in the

The crew would consist of four, and as Zubrin puts it; “true renaissance men and women.” They would comprise of two field scientists, a biogeochemist and a geologist and two mechanics. The primary flight engineer should be a “Jack-of-all-trades”, able to help all other crew members with their daily tasks, as well as being the flight commander. In all each, crew member should be competent in as both active field scientists and mechanical engineers.


The ERV would carry only a supply of hydrogen, and a chemical and nuclear reaction plant to produce methane and oxygen for the return flight home for both the ERV and the second ship. The second ship would be called the "Mars Habitat Unit" (MHU) and would bring a crew of four to the surface of Mars. Due to the effects of prolonged exposure to zero gravity, this ship would have the habitat unit would set on a rotating axis in order to create artificial gravity for the astronauts. The MHU also includes a small, pressurized land rover that would be assembled on the surface of Mars in order to save space on the ship. The rover would be powered by the methane produced by the ERV Powered by a small methane engine, and would be used primarily to explore the regions around the base.

Because of the limited amount of spacecraft and flight crew, Zubrin estimated that the initial mission with the two spacecraft and crew would cost about 55 billion dollars, only an eighth of the cost of the SEI proposal, and with each successor mission costing less as the technology improved. Overall, Mars Direct offers a cheap and relatively safe way for mankind’s exploration of Mars to continue.


References

Zubrin, Robert-The Free Press-The Case for Mars: The Plan to settle the Red Planet and why we must; 1996

http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/mars_worldbook.html

http://chapters.marssociety.org/toronto/Education/MarsDirect.shtml