While they focused primarily on more traditional mission architectures, Zubrin began to collaborate with colleague David Baker's extremely simple, stripped-down and robust strategy. After receiving approval from management at Marietta, a 12-man team within the company began to work out the details of the mission. Zubrin's alternative to this "Battlestar Galactica" mission strategy (dubbed so by its detractors for the large, nuclear powered spaceships that supposedly resembled the science-fiction spaceship of the same name) involved a longer surface stay, a faster flight-path in the form of a conjunction class mission, in situ resource utilization and craft launched directly from the surface of Earth to Mars as opposed to be being assembled in orbit or by a space-based drydock. The exact opposite of the correct way to do engineering. Zubrin came to understand that if NASA's plan was to fully utilize as many technologies as possible in support of sending the mission to Mars, it would become politically untenable. While working at Martin Marietta designing interplanetary mission architectures, Robert Zubrin perceived a fundamental flaw in the SEI program. Within a year, all funding requests for SEI had been denied.ĭan Goldin became NASA Administrator on April 1, 1992, officially abandoning plans for near-term human exploration beyond Earth orbit with the shift towards a "faster, better, cheaper" strategy for robotic exploration. The "90 Day Study" as it came to be known (also “90 Day Report” from people such as Zubrin), evoked a hostile Congressional reaction towards SEI given that it would have required the largest single government expenditure since World War II.
īy December 1990, a study to estimate the project's cost determined that long-term expenditure would total approximately 450 billion dollars spread over 20 to 30 years. In a speech on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum he described long-term plans which would culminate in a human mission to the surface of Mars.
Bush announced plans for what came to be known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI).
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