The Mars Underground: Settling Man On Mars

Since the manned Apollo Missions to the Moon NASA has become stagnant and many believe the lack of goals and timescales such as those set by John F. Kennedy's "Put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade" speech and weaning public interest are the root cause.

The next obvious target for a manned space mission is Mars and in this documentary aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin claims we could already be there. Zubrin worked on Mars Direct a 1990 paper designed to plan a cost effective trip to Mars using available materials and technology of the time and is also an author and speaker on the subject. His revised plan is to have man settled on Mars in 2024 and we see how the mission would unfold, how we would eventually colonise the red planet and even change it's atmosphere. But getting NASA on his side has not been easy and we also hear from experts who refute Zubrin's claims.

Watch the full documentary now on Documentary Fans Release Date: 2007 Duration: 1 Hour 14 Minutes.

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Moon Machines: The Lunar Module

When President John F. Kennedy said in 1961 America would put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade he set NASA an unimaginable task. To build a rocket capable of traveling the 384,400 km to the moon, Safely land, take off from the moon and return to earth with the technology available in the sixties would be a monumental task. Let's face it The Wright Brothers had just achieved the first manned flight on earth fifty years earlier and that only went 120 feet.

The original plan was to fly a rocket all the way to the moon and land the complete rocket on the surface. This was indeed the plan for quiet some time, but how do you land a huge rocket on the moon, how would the astronauts get out of the 70 ft rocket and how much fuel would be needed to take off again ? One man at NASA had a different Idea, his name was John Houbolt but not being one of the main engineering team he struggled to get his voice heard. It was Houbolt that formulated the idea for a craft that would shuttle to the moon while the mother ship stayed in orbit, then the craft could return and dock with the mother ship.

But Wernher von Braun was the NASA expert on rockets and the face of the Apollo project, he was married to the Full rocket landing approach and cast Houbolt and his ideas aside. But with the full rocket idea not looking feasible Houbolt went over von Braun's head to Bob Seamans an Associate Administrator. Houbolt  feared this action could get him fired but while Seamans was unsure he decided to at least let Houbolt present his idea for consideration.

In the documentary we see how von Braun eventually came around to the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) idea. We meet with the people at Grumman Aircraft tasked with making the Lunar Module. And the enormous part the Lunar Excursion Module played in the Apollo missions from the first Moon landing module called The Eagle to the Apollo 13 mission when the module was used to save the lives of the three astronauts aboard.

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