Many of the industry’s largest vfx and animation studios responded to NASA’s public call for submissions of new Martian exploration ideas and strategies. NASA leaders started moving away from aeronautical engineering solutions and leaning more towards computer graphics-based solutions after realizing the bulk of public submissions called for building a secret team of superheroes and friendly mutants that can harness the power of inter-galactic wormholes to protect Earth against the coming war with evil robot space zombies. With no viable next-gen rocket technology in development and estimates by scientists that sending astronauts to Mars is 10 years and $250 billion dollars away, NASA heads realized that the promise of a generation of people looking at the stars had been replaced by a generation of people looking at Jersey Shore.  True space exploration was effectively dead, they concluded.  Capturing the hearts and minds of future space junkies might only take some 3D software and a bit of rendering.

Image courtesy of NASA/nasaimages.org