The Mars Underground

Hey guys,

i came across this possible gem:

http://www.themarsunderground.com/

Allthough i know dr Zubrins' ideas aren't 100% sound, they are surely stimulating the vision of space colonization. I find several sites who mention this DVD was released, but i can't find it anywhere.

Anyone any ideas or is this a gem that didn't reach the screen ?

Interesting graphics and trailer; I'd be willing to see it just based off of that. Zubrin's an interesting character, very controversial. And it's not so much his engineering that stirs the controversy, as his politics. But that's another story altogether.

It's a great trailer, I would love to see mars as blue and green as it is at the end of the trailer

You have to give him credit, Robert Zubrin is one of the most tenacious individuals around when it comes to human exploration of Mars. Whether you think his ideas are feasible or not he has managed to get a huge amount of publicity for them and get people considering the possibilities.

Its a real pity NASA didn't have a group of Zubrins pushing human spaceflight a decade and a half ago, we would have a moon base by now.

Quite true. We would at least have had an HLLV by now.

Thanx for the responses but it wasn't obviously what i hoped for so i did something silly and e-mailed the marssociety:



It''s superb that they even e-mailed me back within a few hours. I just hope that the content of the next response would be positive regarding the documentary-film.

From Scott Gill:



I got a little impatient At least now i have something to look forward to...

http://www.dvdorchard.com.au/product.as ... %2E3511469

Release is apparently 11/10/2006. Now, do the Aussies use the day-month system or the month-day system?

It's the 11th day of the 10th month. I just checked a few other pages on their site and the other release dates go higher than twelve on the first number

Check the mars underground website itself. You can preorder there also now. Allthough they say the dvd will be ready to ship in November... And it is also a bit more expensive then from the australian site.

Well, i ordered it from a shop in Australia and received the DVD today and i watched it immediately off course. I knew it was relatively short, 85 mins, but in the end it was overall kinda dissapointing. The graphics were okay, nothing fancy but better then most discovery channel graphics. The story begins with Zubrin's history of his mars direct plan. That was allready more then 20 mins. Nothing wrong with it, but i have the idea that it is nothing more then the movie of his book 'the case for Mars', which i haven't read yet (i do have it).

I remember reading one review which stated that Zubrin is more or less excentric and he is not very kind with people who don't agree with him. Well, sadly, i have to disagree. There is one fragment of video where he is talking to a board of congress or at least political important people and he gave this speech in which he went practicly almost out of control and the first thing anybody said was 'you sound kinda mad'. Allthough his points were true and imo just, people generally don't like it when you give them a rant.

It's a pitty, the guy is brilliant and passionate, but if he would have more and better communication skills, i bet we would have a better chance of having a Mars program at NASA.

Overall Zubrin (mentioned often as 'Bob', lol) didn't had even an A4 sheet of paper of lines, so in my view it was dissapointing. I would have loved to see a lot more of him (no matter how silly he would get) because now it's just old information in a new suit......

Is anyone working on a story that sort of follows Zubrin's Mars Direct type program? I would like to read about how authors would treat a realistic Mars project scenario. I am just starting to think about this and if anyone has any ideas please let me know.

The guy's plan is now nearly verbatim the NASA reference mission.

There isn't really any point in a follow up documentary until there is something to follow up.