Reception
Zubrin and Baker pitched Mars Direct at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where reception was generally positive. Flown around the country, the engineers' plan generated significant interest. When their tour culminated in a demonstration at the National Space Society they received a standing ovation. The plan gained rapid media attention shortly afterwards.
Resistance to the plan came from teams within NASA working on the Space Station and advanced propulsion concepts, as their work would no longer be required to reach Mars. The NASA administration rejected Mars Direct. Zubrin remained committed to the strategy, and after parting with David Baker attempted to convince the new NASA administration of Mars Direct's merits in 1992.
After being granted a small research fund at Martin Marietta, Zubrin and his colleagues successfully demonstrated an in-situ propellant generator which achieved an efficiency of 94%. No chemical engineers partook in the development of the demonstration hardware. After showing the positive results to the Johnson Space Center, the NASA administration still held several reservations about the plan.
In November 2003, Zubrin was invited to speak to the U.S. Senate committee on the future of space exploration. Two months later the Bush administration announced the creation of the Constellation program, a manned spaceflight initiative with the goal of sending humans to the Moon by 2020. While a Mars mission was not specifically detailed, a plan to reach Mars based on utilizing the Orion spacecraft was tentatively developed for implementation in the 2030s. The program's funding was denied in 2011 by the Obama administration and the Constellation program ended.
Read more about this topic: Mars Direct
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
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