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On its second day, the ERV deploys a small nuclear power reactor.
The reactor powers a chemical plant inside the ERV.
The plant will produce the methane-oxygen rocket fuel for the launch home.
The long journey to land a human being on Mars begins.
>> CONTROL: 4, 3, 2, 1, engines start.
>> Carrying the most skillfully assembled flight team in history,
four astronauts begin their two and a half year mission to the red planet.
This will be the first time a human has gone beyond the Earth-Moon system.
To counter the health problems of zero gravity and to fully acclimate the astronauts to Mars,
the ship will deploy a weighted tether, attached to the last stage of the spent rocket booster.
By thrusting the ship into a rotational spin the counter-weight of the rocket will create
centifugal force, and thus artificial gravity.
The crew will be able to live with their feet planted firmly on the floor
during their six-month transit.
On the sixth month of the flight, the crew will gaze upon an alien world.
This is the new frontier.
>> CREW: Oh it's spectacular, just spectacular.
>> CONTROL: Three and a half down. Nine forward. At 75 feet, guys looking good.
Down a half. 6 forward. 60 seconds. Lights on, forward, forward, 3 feet down. 2 and a
half.
Picking up some dust, big shadow.
More forward. Drifting to the right a little. 30 seconds.
Contact light. Okay engine stop. Proceeding on the LTV.
(Applause) We're on Mars everybody. We're on Mars.
>> For more than 500 days, the astronauts will live on Mars
and embark on one of the greatest journeys of discovery in the history of science.
Will they find life, or the fossilized remains of past life?
Such a discovery could tell us whether our solar system has seen more than one genesis,
and answer the ultimate question: "are we alone?"
In any case, these explorers will be learning how feasible
the colonization of Mars really is,
and whether or not mankind has a future among the stars.
Then, when the time comes, and the window for Earth return opens,
the crew will climb into their Earth Return Vehicle, and head home.
They will arrive home heroes,
the first to stretch the limit of Man's expanse from one planet to another,
their names added the list of great explorers of new worlds.
In their footsteps, others will follow.
What began as a trickle is free to rise into a deluge of human kind,
sweeping over a once-barren land, and transforming it into a viable, new world.
When Baker and Zubrin presented Mars Direct to their bosses at Martin,
they expected the worst.
To their surprise, management was excited about it.
They liked the fact that everything needed was relatively simple, and near term.
>> BAKER: As time went on, Martin Marietta embraced Mars Direct as their creation.
and put Bob and I on an airplane to several NASA centers to present Mars Direct
and try to build some monentum for it.
>> Baker and Zubrin flew to Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
This had been one of the original design hubs for the Apollo moon landings.
Tag-team style, Baker and Zubrin presented their alternative mission architecture.
The response was thrilling. The old-school Apollo crowd embraced it.
This was a plan that actually made sense, and was within reach.
Over the new few weeks, Zubrin and Baker were flown around the country,
pitching to all branches of NASA.
And everywhere they went, the response was electric.
The plan was standing up to scrutiny,
and groups all over NASA were converting to Mars Direct.
Their talk culminated in a public presentation to the National Space Society.
The crowd gave the two aerospace engineers a standing ovation.
(applause)
A week later, the story was in newspapers around the country.
But as quickly as doors opened for Zubrin and Baker,
they began to close.
The NASA administration rejected Mars Direct.
The two engineers were outsiders again.
But Zubrin remained determined.
>> BAKER: Bob had grabbed hold of it, and I could see that it was his,
and no matter what I did, he was going to do what he was going to do.
And he was going to be a proponent for it and push it
and I really saw my role sort of evaporate.
It's a little bit like being a dim planet next to a bright star around him,
in terms of his enthusiasm, and you really can't compete with that.
All you can do is decide how you're going to deal with it.
>> By Feburary 1991, Baker quit Martin to start his own firm.
Zubrin battled on. For the next year and a half, Zubrin tried to get NASA to pay attention.
Giving speeches, writing papers, but Mars Direct's time seemed to have passed.
But then a new administration came into power at NASA.
They agreed to give Mars Direct a second look,
if Zubrin could prove that producing rocket fuel on Mars would work.
Zubrun and his team built a machine.
It could take CO2, the dominant gas in the Martian atmosphere,
combine it with a little H2 and produce a CH4-O2 fuel.
>> ZUBRIN: We did it in three months, with a very small team.
We built a plant that was 94% efficient.
And no one who actually particiapted in that effort was actually a real chemical engineer.
They were all aerospace engineers, like me, who were simply dabbling in chemistry
in order to prove to NASA that 19th century chemical engineering really worked.
>> With the new administrator, Dan Goldin, getting behind Mars Direct
he had Zubrin give detailed briefings of the mission plan
to the engineers at the Johnson Space Center.
They liked it, but had some problems.
Dave Weaver was the lead mission architect.
>> WEAVER: There were a number of things we were concerned about with Bob Zubrin's mission.
First of all, we thought his esimates of mass were probably too optimistic.
Didn't have sufficient margins for a variety of things.