Robert Zubrin
In July 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, the first President Bush called for America to renew its pioneering push into space with the establishment of a permanent Lunar base and a series of human missions to Mars. While many have said that such an endeavor would be excessively costly and take many decades, a small team at Martin Marietta drew up a daring plan that could sharply cut costs and send a group of American astronauts to the Red Planet within ten years. The plan, known as "Mars Direct," has attracted international attention and broad controversy, including coverage in such publications as Newsweek, Fortune, The Economist, Air and Space Smithsonian, the New York Times, the London Times, the Boston Globe and Izvestia. It has also been covered by the Discovery Channel, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Its principal author, Robert Zubrin, has presented it to such fora as the International Astronautical Federation congress in Germany, and the blue ribbon "Synthesis Group" headed by former Apollo astronaut General Thomas Stafford, as well as to various government officials, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, and current NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Now, with the revival of the call for a human space exploration initiative, the Mars Direct plan is at the center of the debate: Can Americans reach the Red Planet in our time? Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is meeting in Berlin to discuss the plan for Aurora, their project to visit Mars with a robotic vehicle (ExoMars) as a first step to human exploration. Will the United States be missing this boat?

There is a very good short article about MARS DIRECT on Wikipedia. Take a moment to read it, you will be amazed at the cleverness of this project, which sounds as much like science fiction as science, but is taken seriously by NASA.

VISIT MARS: