John Connolly | deputy for the group | Apollo | administrator

NASA's human-transport plans are both futuristic and retro. John Connolly was a deputy for the group that was given a 90-day challenge in the summer of 2005 to create a new vehicle for getting humans to the moon and to Mars. "We went back to documents that were written in the 1960s, and we had a blue-ribbon group of folks who walked on the moon to help," he says. "Subconsciously, we really didn't want this to look like Apollo.­ We wanted it to look like our generation's spacecraft, our trip to the moon. But after three months of study, we learned that it's the physics that basically shape what the vehicles look like." NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin calls it "Apollo on steroids," referring to the greater size and expanded capacities of the new vehicle.

Much of the system will rely on recycled shuttle engines and tanks. A futuristic difference for a return to the moon may be the fuel sources. "Eighty percent of the mass you land on the moon is your rocket fuel to get home," says Connolly. "If you could manufacture a fraction of that, there's an incredible economy."

Once on the moon, "there are chemical ways of cracking the oxygen out of the moon dirt, which is called regolith. It's ground-up rocks, really," Connolly says. "We've actually done experiments using real lunar samples that the astronauts brought home in the '60s, and we've proved in the laboratory that it can be done." He is also optimistic about producing methane on Mars, which would provide another good rocket-fuel component.

In theory, he says, "You could manufacture all the oxygen you'd need to breathe, all the water you'd need to drink, and all the fuel you'd need to get you home."

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