It's good to come to sites like this and see like-minded space enthusiasts. "Mars Direct" as discussed by the Augustine Panel, was really a misnomer since the plan as proposed by the Panel as an option did not include setting down on the martian ground. While the so-called "Mars Direct" option supposedly "skips the moon and focuses on the sending astronauts directly to Mars," the option really only gets us to the moon, just with different mission objectives as Space.com reported: "the plan would only send humans to the moon or near-Earth asteroids in order to test hardware for the Mars mission" (
http://www.space.com/news/090805-human- ... tions.html).
Bitter sweet though it was, I was able to attend the last panel meeting here in DC, and I noted that Dr. Ed Crawley and Dr. Sally Ride had revised the option name, including on the power point presentations, to "Mars First" rather than "Mars Direct", which is good since it neither reflects getting there directly nor Zubrin's design.
As I sat through that meeting and got the feeling that some of the committee certainly wanted to go to Mars first, despite budgetary constraints, I could not help but wonder why NASA's Design Reference Mission or Zubrin's MD was not listed as an option. There was no mention and it appeared in their desparation that this panel did not even know of Mars Direct. Of course, that could not be the case since Norman Augustine's company initially embraced Mars Direct as its own creation. It simply made (and makes) no sense to me. There are options available that do fit within the current 10 budget.
Of course, doing a little research on the Panel's website left me even more confused and frustrated when I learned that Robert Zubrin had, in fact, presented testimony regarding Mars Direct and a vision for the future of human space flight to the committee in a public hearing on August 5th in DC at the Carnegie Institute of Science (and I'm kicking myself for not attending this one).
Anyway, perhaps someone on here has had better luck or is simply more knowledable regarding the reasoning behind the comittees apparent complete dismissal of Zubrin's presentations 7 days prior to their own the 12th. I submitted a question to the Panel's Q&A section about a week ago regarding Mars Direct and NASA's Design Reference Plan as I was unable to find anything in that section about it. A day later a question was posted, though rephrased and narrowed in scope, to the "Old Mars Direct approach." In with the new and out with the old I suppose. I detected a bit of bias in how they chose to post the question. I would have rather the question posted addressed NASA's Design Reference Mission which were, obviously, more acceptable to the NASA establishment than the original Mars Direct architecture. I wanted to hear from the committee why this architecture will not work as it is currently articulated--or at least why they think it won't work. I've yet to get an answer.
Anyway, if you're interested, go to
http://hsf.nasa.gov/qa.php and to "Keyword Search". Type in "Mars Direct" and vote up this question to increase its chances of getting answered.