Mars Trip Proposed for Space Shuttles

By Tariq Malik Senior Editor posted: 6 January 2009 6:05 pm ET

The co-founder of a rocket launch firm has proposed an audacious plan to send astronauts on a one-way trek to Mars using a pair of tethered U.S. space shuttles that would parachute to the Martian surface.

Inventor Eric Knight, a co-founder of the rocket firm UP Aerospace, detailed the plan - which he's billed "Mars on a Shoestring" - in a thought exercise designed to encourage unconventional thinking for future human spaceflight.

"My thought paper is a mental exercise to encourage new ideas," Knight told SPACE.com in an e-mail interview. "I also hope it spurs a re-evaluation of the timeline for human exploration of Mars. Twenty years seems like an eternity, given that we were able to get to the moon in less than 10 years – and we were essentially doing so 'from scratch.'"

NASA's current plan for future human spaceflight includes retiring its three aging space shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - in 2010, launching their capsule-based successor Orion by 2015 and returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. Any push to Mars would come in the decades that followed under the NASA vision.

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