www.marssociety.org www.planete-mars.comWebmaster: Pierre Brisson
Mars Society Switzerland
Facebook Page pierre_brisson@yahoo.comThe Mars Society Switzerland is on Facebook. You can visit our page by clicking on the above button.
Association Planète Mars is the French Branch of the Mars Society. It was founded in 1999 by Richard Heidmann, a graduate from Ecole Polytechnique and former director at SNECMA in charge of Prospective Research and Developments.
Microsoft and NASA joined together to produce a wonderful software to explore Mars virtually on the basis of all the data gathered by the various orbiters and landers of the space agency. Click on the link below, download and enjoy spectacular views and videos of Mars!
WWT MarsThe Mars Society is an American advocacy society founded in 1998 by Dr Robert Zubrin, then chief engineer for Martin Marietta (which later became Lockheed Martin), the company which conceived and built the Saturn V rockets which made the exploration of the Moon possible. Robert Zubrin worked at the end of the Apollo period on the Mars project which was then considered the next step of Space Exploration. Unfortunately, politics preferred to build the International Space Station. Robert Zubrin, convinced of the feasibility of his project, went on and, in the environment of the “Mars Underground”, put into a book his “Mars Direct” plan. This plan became the basis of NASA’s “Constellation” exploration vision after the second President Bush decided, in 2004, to redirect US Space exploration towards "Moon, Mars and Beyond". The architecture of this vision was embodied in the first Design Reference Mission (“DRM1”). Its basis is ISRU (for In Situ Resources Utilisation”), the “local resources” being mostly the Martian atmosphere. Its merit would be to considerably shrink the mass to be extracted from Earth gravity pit, to realize a mission to Mars. This would allow using chemical motors for rockets, of the kind we already know how to build, while minimizing the necessary spendings to some 50 billion dollars for a whole exploration cycle.
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