Steven Masso
Article Review:
The Promise of Mars by Robert Zubrin
Due: 07/21/2010
In “The Promise of Mars”, Robert Zubrin, the designer of the Mars Direct Mission, describes how NASA will be able to send a manned mission to Mars. Zubrin describes his plan with much detail. The Mars Direct Mission will allow a team of astronauts to travel directly to Mars, non-stop, as opposed to stopping at a space station in Earth’s orbit. This space station would take a lot of time, effort, and money to construct. This is why Mars direct is the best way to send people to Mars.
If Earth ever becomes uninhabitable, where would humans live? Humanity is very fragile and the universe is extremely vast and dangerous. It is amazing that life has existed on this planet as long as it has. We are surrounded by countless forces that threaten to destroy all life on Earth. Tomorrow a natural or manmade disaster could annihilate everything that we know and love. Mars is the closest planet to Earth, as well as the most similar. Mars is the most likely candidate for humanity’s new home. At the moment, no terrestrial being can survive in the harsh Martian environment, because it is too cold, there is no breathable air, and the lack of atmospheric pressure can tear a human being apart.
Aerospace engineer, Robert Zubrin planned the first manned mission to Mars. He named his plan Mars Direct, because it was a way to send humans to Mars directly from Earth’s surface. Mars is thirty-five million miles away from the Earth. The amount of fuel needed for a round trip to Mars would be too great. That huge quantity of fuel would weigh the spaceship down, it would not be able to blast off the surface of the Earth. Zubrin devised a way to work around that problem. His plan involves sending two spaceships. First, an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV) would be sent to Mars. The ERV would not contain fuel for the trip back. It would arrive on Mars with a processing unit that would produce a methane/oxygen...