Word: less
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...unless you're one of the four people who could be traveling to Mars that month. October 2007 is a good time to begin your journey, since right about then, Earth and Mars will be drifting into an alignment that will allow you to make the trip in less than eight months. It's impossible to say what part of Mars you'll be touching down on, but odds are you'll land somewhere near the broad equatorial belt. While temperatures elsewhere on Mars fall to a murderous -220[degrees]F, they can climb to a shirt-sleeve 68[degrees...
...March 20]. The consumer will have to remodel the kitchen to accept new gadgets. We'll have to reinvent a nail for the elegant hammer and prepare attractive trash for the see-through wastebasket. We architects designed buildings based on such concepts as "form follows function," "organic architecture" and "less is more." Now industrial designers are coining terms like "blobjects," "commodity chic" and "cutensils" by creating items to match. Kudos to them. CLEMENT R. PRABAKARAN Sterling Heights, Mich...
Whichever approach is chosen, what all of them have in common is the speed with which they could be pulled off. Unlike the early Apollo planners, who weren't even sure they could get astronauts into near-Earth space, much less fling them out to the moon, Mars-mission directors have the basic space-travel technology down cold. All they need is the go-ahead to design and build their machines...
...that will lift the ships off the ground are reconfigured engines cannibalized from the shuttle. The technology needed to distill the Martian atmosphere is the stuff of first-year chemistry texts. For this reason, Zubrin believes, Mars Direct could be surprisingly affordable: about $40 billion for five missions, or less than half the cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars...
NASA has plenty of money but zero interest in making space less expensive for the little guys. So the little guys are racing to do what NASA has failed to do: design a reusable launch system that's inexpensive, safe and reliable. Kelly Space's prototype looks like a plane that has sprouted rocket engines. Rotary Rocket in Redwood City, Calif., has a booster with rotors to make a helicopter-style return to Earth; Kistler Aerospace in Kirkland, Wash., is piecing together its version from old Soviet engines, shuttle-style thermal protection tiles and an elaborate parachute system. The first...