NASA’s Plans

Abstract

Remember that old saying “You can’t tell the players without a score card”? Well it is hard to tell how we got to the current plan to go to Mars without a roadmap. There have been so many studies over the decades by so many people that one requires to be guided to the current plan. If that isn’t difficult enough, this book proposes to change the plan, or at least to alter the sequence of events. But before that is discussed, it is important to understand how we got to where we are now. I don’t think we need to go back more than a generation to understand that, but if you want to go back further, read Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000 by David S. F. Portree, published in 2011 by the NASA Headquarters History Office.