A new, cost-constrained U.S. strategy to send humans on Mars has been blueprinted.
The study team believes placing a crew on the Red Planet could be achieved within projected NASA budgets by minimizing new developments and relying mainly on already available or planned NASA assets.
This important study has been published in New Space, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
“A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars,” has been authored by a trio of experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
They propose a long-term, stepwise series of missions to Mars that would begin with a crew landing on Mars’s moon Phobos in 2033, and followed by a short-stay mission in 2039 and a year-long landing in 2043.
In addition, the study is augmented by an informative editorial, “We Can Send Humans to Mars Safely and Affordably,” authored by New Space editor-in-chief, G. Scott Hubbard of Stanford University.
“With all of these previous technical and fiscal issues addressed, we can again believe that the dream of sending people to Mars is alive,” Hubbard writes. “The next step is to build a broad consensus around the goal and strategy for a long term, humans to Mars program.”
The hope is that the ideas and principles introduced — in whole or in part — can be a useful input to the process of structuring an implementable human journey to Mars in our lifetime.
NOTE: Both the editorial and the detailed paper are available free on the New Space website until July 29, 2015.
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Will your proposal incorporate any of the plans of SpaceX? (Notwithstanding the recent launch failure)
Will your proposal incorporate any of the plans of SpaceX?