Finally returned from the Sixth Annual Mars Society Conference in Eugene, OR. I’ll have many reports on it this week, as I sift through my thirty-five pages of handwritten notes for interesting bits of info.
The primary message of the conference was great, and dovetails with what a lot of space advocates have been saying since February:
- The United States needs a manned space exploration program;
- NASA, the present custodian of that program, needs a focus for its efforts; and
- Mars should be that focus.
Much to my surprise, over the course of the conference Bob Zubrin repeatedly made the same arguments as I did in my presentation: the Shuttle stack (sans orbiter) is the best available basis for a Saturn V-class heavy-lift launch vehicle, and it must not be abandoned when (inevitably) Shuttle is phased out of service.
Much much more later…
We now not only have the organization (well, sort of) and the arguments needed to make sure that the loss of this capability is not allowed to happen, but we also have the lesson of history. We need to point ot what happened at the end of the Apollo era, and see to it that it is not allowed to happen again.