FROM AIAA Daily Launch, July 1, 2014:

ARM Promoted As Fruitful First Step Toward Mars. In an article for the Space Review (6/30), Louis Friedman, Executive Director-Emeritus of the Planetary Society, and Thomas Jones, veteran astronaut and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, wrote about why NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is the “affordable and logical first step” for NASA to send people to Mars despite what the recent National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human Spaceflight report claimed. With the Apollo and ISS programs the only “successful examples of government support for human space exploration initiatives,” the authors believe that ARM can build the “sustainable momentum” needed at a time there is no “strong geopolitical rationale” for missions to Mars. ARM also would get astronauts into deep space “much sooner, and at much lower cost” than a lunar mission, although the authors do not rule out missions to the moon. Just by examining the NRC report’s recommendations, ARM was an “attractive first step” toward Mars.

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