Mars to Stay will take a special kind of person. Instead of the traditional pilot/scientist/engineer, Martian homesteaders will be selected more for their personalities—flexible, inventive and determined in the face of unpredictability. In short, survivors. The Mars Artists Community has adopted Mars to Stay as their primary policy initiative. During a 2009 public hearing of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee at which Dr. Robert Zubrin presented a summary of the arguments in his book "The Case for Mars", dozens of placards reading "Mars Direct Cowards Return to the Moon" were placed throughout the Carnegie Institute. The passionate uproar among space exploration
Human mission to Mars intermediate steps before the landing on Mars, including human missions to Phobos; and the "Great Exploration" proposal from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, among others. In response to a presidential initiative, NASA made a study of a project for human lunar- and Mars exploration as a proposed follow-on to the International Space Station project. This resulted in a report, called the "90-day study", in which the agency proposed a long-term plan consisting of completing the Space Station as "a critical next step in all our space endeavors," returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent base, and then sending astronauts to