Different Scenarios for human missions to Mars

Conferenciante: Dr. Jean-Marc Salotti, Profesor en el Instituto Politécnico de Burdeos (Bordeaux-INP) y miembro titular de la prestigiosa Academia Internacional de Astronáutica (IAA).

Día: Lunes 23 de octubre.
Hora: 12:30.
Lugar: Sala de grados A (E.T.S.I. Telecomunicación).


Resumen: NASA has been working on different scenarios for human missions to Mars for more than 20 years. However, the American agency changed its view several times and its proposals were so complex, costly and not convincing that the Congress and the US Presidents refused to finance that mission. At the same time, Space X and other astronautical experts made different proposals, claiming that it is possible to go to Mars using a different approach. In this conference, I will present the challenges of a human mission to Mars, the different options, trying to show that NASA made methodological mistakes and that much simpler, affordable scenarios do exist.

Bibliografía: Jean-Marc Salotti is currently Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Bordeaux. He has been involved in human space exploration studies for 20 years and published more than 50 papers in that domain. In 2012, he published a new scenario for a human mission to Mars. In 2015, he was invited by NASA to present his work at the Affording Mars Workshop. In 2016, he was a major contributor of a Cosmic Study published by the International Academy of Astronautics dedicated to human space exploration of Mars. The same year, he published a new architecture for human missions to Mars, which is based on the "semi-direct" concept originally proposed by Robert Zubrin. More recently, he was involved in technical studies on the feasibility of long term human settlement of Mars. He is member of the French Chapter of the Mars Society and fulll Academician of the prestigious International Academy of Astronautics.