Denver, Colorado, January 2004— an unusual and unexpected team of researchers has banded together to solve the problem of returning astronauts from an extended stay on Mars.

With President Bush’s announcement of a human Mars program, accented by the stunning successes of Opportunity and Spirit landings, Mars is in the hearts and on the minds of many Americans today. Colorado resident Dr. Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society intended to bring a Mars mission back to the forefront of academic thought through the foundation of the Kepler Prize Competition, a spacecraft design competition geared towards a critical portion of the “Mars Direct” plan—the plan to return astronauts home from Mars. This is the forum that Team Enterprise, a mixed group of academics, engineers, and military, banded together, hoping their unique skill sets hold the combination for the competition’s winning design.

They asked each team to prepare an overview of their plan by January 1st, and be submit their final paper by June 1st. The winning submission will be presented at Mars Society national conference in August. There are seven different categories that each submission is judged upon:

The Plan

Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, has made the Mars Direct theory famous in his book The Case for Mars. In the Mars Direct plan two launches of a heavy lift booster optimized for Earth escape are required to support each 4 person mission. The first booster launch delivers an unfueled and unmanned Earth Return Vehicle (ERV) to the Martian surface, where it fills itself with methane/oxygen bipropellant manufactured primarily out of indigenous resources. After propellant production is completed, a second launch delivers the crew to the prepared site, where they conduct extensive regional exploration for 1.5 years and then return directly to Earth in the ERV. No on-orbit assembly or orbital rendezvous is required in any phase of the mission, and the same set of booster, crew habitat, and ERV used to support Mars missions can also be used to support a lunar base.

Team Enterprise’s design differs from conventional human spacecraft in several important ways. The propulsion, instead of a standard chemical reaction, uses super heating from solar-thermal propulsion with chemical propellant for a faster and more efficient return to Earth. This method of shortening the return trip from Mars is not only good in the amount of fuel produced, but also better for the mental and emotional health of the astronauts in the mission.

Another challenge often highlighted in the news is hazards due to space weather and Solar wind. Team Enterprise’s design tackles the problem of radiation and micrometeorite hits with a never-before attempted method: generating a magnetic field around the spacecraft, (deflecting radiation in the same way that Earth’s magnetic field protects the Earth), combined with an electron gun to charge (and eventually deflect), small micrometeorites. Cosmic rays, another hazard for any human space crew, are deflected by creative placement of the crew’s water supply.

Team Enterprise hopes that these ideas will result in a winning submission, but also a reliable, efficient and quick return from the Red Planet.

About Team Enterprise

Our team of six men and one woman is submitting a plan for the contest. We hope our ideas spark the interest not just of those on the Kelper Prize committee, but also NASA scientists, corporate engineers, as well as people from non technical walks of life. Our team is unique in that we come from collaborations in both engineering, military, scientific, and creative fields, the effects of which, we feel, result in a better design for the mission. Our innovative designs have not necessarily been combined with a manned mission plan before, but might be the key to a long term mission with the smallest amount of fuel possible.

> Contacts
> Team Enterprise Bios
> Save as MS Word file