Mission to Mars; My Vision for Space Exploration

xiii, [1], 258 pages. Illustrations (some in color). Appendix. Index. Foreword by Andrew Aldrin. Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.; January 20, 1930) is an American engineer, former astronaut, and Command Pilot in the United States Air Force. As Lunar Module Pilot on the Apollo 11 mission, he and mission commander Neil Armstrong were the first two humans to land on the Moon. Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on July 21, 1969 (UTC), 9 minutes after Armstrong first touched the surface. One of his first missions was on Gemini 12 where he successfully proved that extravehicular activity (EVA) could be performed by astronauts, spending over 5 hours outside the craft, thus achieving the goals of the Gemini program and paving the way for the Apollo program. Leonard David is a space journalist, reporting on space activities for over 50 years. He was past editor of Final Frontier, as well as NSS' Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He also contributes to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aerospace America magazine. Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration is a 2013 book written by retired NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David. In the book, Aldrin outlines his plan for humans to be able to colonize Mars by the year 2035. The books goes over a number of past and then current space concepts, policy, and future mission concepts. He encouraged future missions to not focus on strictly on Mars exploration, but also on Mars settlement. The books goes beyond just Mars missions to review the overall space exploration vision-scape, such as considering the viability of Lunar missions and international cooperation in space. Derived from a Kirkus review: The moonwalking astronaut offers a passionate manifesto encompassing space tourism and the inevitability of inhabiting Mars within a couple of decades. For the author, who wrote the book with the assistance of veteran space journalist David, the moon is the past, at least as an American governmental prioritywhile Mars is the future. His vision for bringing space exploration back to the launching pad includes international cooperation rather than competition, private enterprise augmenting public subsidy, and space travel within the reach of citizens who have deep pockets. Aldrin envisions a cruise-ship model of commercial space travel. Maybe this seems feasible, but he then proceeds to his more audacious proposal: settling Mars as an outpost of human habitation, not merely exploration. It would be a six-month, one-way trip, and he sees no reason to provide those initial explorers with a return ticket: What he terms the "deposit, no return" nature of those voyages awaits a generation ready to go where no man has ever gone beforeand to stay there. You may say that hes a dreamer; celebrate him as a visionary, or dismiss this as futurist fantasy.…