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:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)