by Mary Timmons
It's a small, small world for the Illinois MBA program, where students are going extraterrestrial on a startlingly routine basis. The continuing story of these B-school adventures beyond the stratosphere was launched in 1996 with a series of ongoing projects for Venture Star, the consortium that will privatize the NASA space shuttle and send for-profit payloads rocketing into Earth's orbit (and, presumably, over the top of the balance sheet). Now a group of Illinois MBA students is working with groups from five other schools to develop NASA's Human Exploration of Mars Program.

"Our proposal makes use of the technological resources we have here at the University of Illinois, and is focused on creating a truly global effort," explains team leader Shannon Kraus. A first-year MBA student (who is also studying for a master's in architecture), Kraus explains: "It can't be just the U.S. carrying out this mission. The whole world needs to come together and pool resources - to transcend continental boundaries and join in a global mission to Mars."

In December, Kraus and his team -- comprised of Greg Locke, Craig Stack, Wayne Graff, Preston Corless, Nicole Walker, Mary Jacob, Albert Burgos, Jennifer Cisna, Adriana Mendez, Vikas Khajanchi and Brian Jurczyk -- submitted their ideas to the 1999 NASA Means Business Student Competition Program. The proposal - turbo-written in only four days, immediately after finals -- was one of just five finalists chosen in the nationwide competition.

The good news was received in mid-January, giving the team just a few months to get their work off the launch pad. On the agenda for the Illinois MBA Mars Exploration Business Plan -- comprehensive proposals on finance, marketing, public relations, strategic planning, product development, and management and administration. The results of their work will be presented at the NASA Customer Engagement Conference in Houston this May.

"We anticipate involvement with a lot of companies, in a truly international effort," predicts Kraus. "One of the major merits of our proposal is to identify companies which can make key contributions - for example, finding an automotive company that can build a vehicle that will operate on Mars, or an energy company to provide the needed fuel technology." In all of this, says Kraus, "We are following the Venture Star model."

Through the Venture Star project - which got a dramatic blast-off three years ago when former astronaut T. J. Mattingly visited the Illinois campus -- successive teams of Illinois MBA students have provided consulting work on business issues that face the consortium, composed of NASA, Lockheed-Martin, and other companies. Ranging from selling advertising space on the shuttle's nose cone to depreciating the spacecraft for tax purposes, student work has been acknowledged by Lockheed to be of consistently high quality -- so high that it has sometimes been superior to that of paid consultants. Kraus and his team would seem to be similarly inspired.

"We're looking on this as an e-mission to Mars," says Kraus. "We can involve people from all over the world in different aspects of the project - on-line. The spacecraft will be making the journey for months, and there will be lots of different activities and experiments taking place on board. That means lots of opportunities for different groups to get involved over the Net.

"There truly are no boundaries."