This story boggles the mind.

An international team of scientists is given $350,000 and two years to develop a Mars mission, and this is what they come up with? Whether or not one considers the "Mars Direct" architecture to be the "right" way to get to Mars, it really is the architecture to beat. So, how does this architecture stack up against Mars Direct and/or its various cousins?

Well, first off, one immediately notices that the mission stay-time on the Martian surface is only 34 days. 34 days? Haven't we heard that number before? Oh, yes, we have -- in the notorious "90 Day Report".

And then, as in that earlier document, one finds that the designed mission "requires" certain exotic and as-yet undeveloped elements, such as a new launcher, nuclear propulsion, etc.:

Aldrin said the earlier U.S. Department of State-funded Project 1172 scripted a human Mars trek. The two-year long study cost $350,000, creating a credible scenario that had a crew staying on the red planet for 34 days. Aspects of that assessment involved use of a new launcher, ultra-thin solar arrays, as well as nuclear propulsion and power hardware to help pull off a Mars sojourn. An estimated cost for the stopover on Mars was roughly $20 billion to $22 billion.

But not to worry -- a follow-on study promises to tackle the infrastructure required for such a mission. Wanna bet they propose a massive new space station and/or a base on the Moon as "required infrastructure" for the first manned Mars missions?

You'd think that somewhere in those two years of research they would have stumbled across Mars Direct, et al, and perhaps proposed some improvements on the idea. All right, yes, so I understand the diplomatic and national security justifications behind employing ex-Soviet scientist in make-work to keep them from going "rogue". All the same, that money would have been better spent by giving it to the Mars Society to use in developing the knowledge base.