Houston, We have Landed on Mars

a fanatic band of hippie scientists has sold nasa on a manned mission to the red planet

Mars is six months away. One hundred and eighty days. It's a journey 1000 times more distant from earth than anyone has ever undertaken before. But we could fly there in less time than it took Christopher Columbus to make his first trip to the New World and back, in less time than it takes to finish a baseball season.

Aboard rockets from earth launched into an elliptical orbit around the sun, at speeds 20 times faster than the old lunar spacecraft, astronauts would arrive at the red planet more than a week shy of Shannon Lucid's record stay on Mir. Once down, hunkered into spartan habitats like Antarctic explorers, equipped with tools, scientific equipment and a methane-powered rover, the crew would spend roughly a year and a half exploring a Montana-sized patch of the frozen, dry, rust-colored planet, determining (among other things) if life exists there, or ever has. With a six-month return trip, the entire mission would take two and a half years. That's still half a year less than it took Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to sail around the world.

The greatest voyage in history would cost about $40 billion over a decade, the cost of a medium-sized weapons system, or less than one tenth of what NASA said in 1989 it would take to send someone to Mars.

All the plan needs now is a patron. Mars needs its own Queen Isabella, King Charles or John F. Kennedy.

The plan that will take mankind to Mars wasn't worked out by bullet-headed backroom NASA engineers. It has been designed, right down to launch requirements (10,000 pounds thrust, 850 seconds), food needs (4800 kilograms) and the perfect material for a Mars greenhouse (Aerogel), by a hippie band of Colorado visionaries that grew up infected with the rhetoric of the moon race. There's Chris McKay, a distracted stork of a man with perpetual wilderness stubble and a hard, clear mind; Tom Meyer, a precocious inventor turned entrepreneur and professional researcher; Penelope Boston, a biologist with a yen for the underground; Boston's husband, Steve Welch, an electronic engineer with maharishi hair and beard; Carter Emmart, a flamboyant artist and poet who collects Barbies; and Bob Zubrin, the garrulous, passionate engineer in a Lenin cap whose elegant problem solving and skillful promotion have put manned exploration of Mars back on the map. With Richard Wagner, Zubrin also wrote The Case for Mars. Allied with higher-profile spaceniks such as former moon man Buzz Aldrin, the late Carl Sagan, former NASA administrator Thomas Paine and dozens of others, this Mars Underground plotted a ruthlessly efficient, eminently doable Mars voyage, not on the grand scale NASA envisioned but in the adventuring spirit of the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María.

Then they did something harder--they managed to sell the space agency on it. Now they will have to sell it to America and the world.

It has ever been so. Columbus didn't smack into San Salvador as the result of a crash ten-year imperial Spanish program of global exploration. Magellan wasn't groomed by some ocean-probing scientific bureaucracy. And even the boys who brought you Apollo didn't start out as the darlings of any power elite. In each instance, the people who eventually bent entire nations to their peculiar obsessions were brilliant, determined dreamers.

Go to Mars?

"Go to the moon" had a different feel. The moon was always the happy goal just beyond our grasp--go ahead, shoot for the moon! Going there was a magical stunt. But today the moon is ours. Mysteries plundered, dust tracked virgin plains planted with staff and flag, austere horizon breached by the one-sixth-g bounce of a smuggled golf ball. In the nearly three decades since, NASA has lost its capacity to amaze. It has become another aimless government bureaucracy in an age when government reigns as the source of all evil. The moon? It's an anachronism. It's our national trophy wife. It was once shimmering and unattainable; now we wonder why we were so interested. Its gray, pockmarked face taunts our shriveled imaginations; it nags us about all we cannot do--If we can go to the moon, why can't we . . . ?

But Mars? More than a daring destination, it's a whole new world. Lore long filled it with fabulous kingdoms, monsters, canals and pyramids, but modern planetary science has mapped a far more desolate place. A crew approaching the planet will see it grow from a pinhole in the night sky to a bright-orange disc the size and color of a new penny. It is about half the size of earth, but without oceans it has more land surface to explore than our world's continents and islands combined. Spinning at almost the same rate as earth (a Mars day is 24.6 hours), it orbits the sun every 687 days on a tilted axis that gives it doublelong earthlike seasons. Noon near Mars' equator on the hottest day of summer can raise soil temperatures to 70°Fahrenheit, but most of the time the planet makes Antarctica look like a summer playground. Mars' winter is so cold--180 at the poles--that the thin Martian air actually freezes solid, creating the cap of white at the pole tilted farthest from the sun. This is not frozen water but frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). There is believed to be a mile-thick layer of water ice beneath that white-capped pole, and plenty more frozen into the clay of Mars' iron-rich (hence rusty) soil.

As the ship gets closer and Mars fills the forward windows of the craft with its strange bright-orange expanse, the crew will see etched across the surface evidence that water flowed freely there long, long ago. In the billions of years since the climate and atmosphere of Mars resembled earth's, it has grown bitterly inhospitable. The thin Mars air (mostly carbon dioxide) is so dry that a bowl of water on the surface would explode into vapor. Scientists originally expected the Mars sky to be blue, right up until Viking 1 touched down on July 20, 1976 and began transmitting the first images from Mars' surface. In its rush to make the pictures public, NASA assumed a blue sky and initially processed the new digital images from that reference color, which made the surface appear greenish brown. A more careful calibration the following day brought a surprise. It showed the surface to be a rust desert and the sky an ethereal, pinkish orange, a kind of pale peach. An alien world.

"Man, it was so cool," says Penny Boston, who was a student at Florida Atlantic University when the pictures were beamed down, a teenager in granny glasses and long blonde hair. "For me it was both an epiphany and a disappointment. Mars was no longer a distant red speck. It was a place, a planet. It gave me a rush similar to what I felt when I saw the first photographs of the whole earth from Apollo 8. But it was disappointing, too. I was hoping to see some Martian giraffes."

Why wasn't life there? Viking's simple soil and air samples found all the elements necessary for it--carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water--but the planet appeared inert. There were some ambiguous results of the soil testing, a spike of suspicious oxygen, probably a mineral reaction but enough to keep diehards hoping. But on the whole Mars looked dead as a bucket of rusty nails. Chris McKay remembers feeling less disappointed than intrigued. How could a planet so promising turn out to be dead?

This question goes to the heart of modern biology. If life, as Darwin's great insight suggested, results from a simple algorithm operating naturally over geological time, then it ought to evolve wherever necessary ingredients and conditions exist. Either that or we're back to the hand of God. It is possible, of course, that in a universe of billions of stars, life evolved on earth alone, or first anyway. But if current notions of how life arose are correct, that seems unlikely. Even if life is a vanishingly lucky phenomenon, a one-in-a-billion chance would mean it has evolved roughly a billion times in our universe. If the ingredients and conditions for life exist on Mars, and Mars is and always has been dead, it won't topple the edifice of modern biology. But it will make it tremble. The question is, as McKay says, "important either way." If life does exist there, or did at one time, the implications will be staggering. It would mean life is almost certainly universal. Such a discovery would shatter the earth-centered paradigm of the ages. It would mean the glorious canopy of the heavens breathes, that the light that so dimly reaches earth from distant stars shines brightly on life-forms of near infinite variety.

All of us can feel the importance of possibilities such as these; a scientist is driven to find answers. When Penny Boston saw no giraffes, shrubs or even weeds in those dead pictures from Mars, she set about trying to grow some life-forms. She, McKay and classmate Carol Stoker sucked the air out of giant bell jars to model the low-pressure Martian environment. They grew radishes, and the radishes did fine.

"The standing joke was that I would publish Mother Boston's Radish Cook book," Boston says, "which was a double joke because I never cook."

The demonstration called the Mars Chamber became the first of many experiments that gradually filled Mars headquarters, a small room reached by a narrow staircase beneath the solar telescope dome on the roof of a University of Colorado science building. McKay, Boston, Welch, Meyer and Stoker dubbed themselves the Mars Study Project and began brainstorming on everything from' designing secure living stations, figuring out how to make air, food, water and fuel from Martian resources to "terraforming," that is, altering Mars' air and climate to accommodate human life--in other words, making Mars earthlike.

"When Viking landed on Mars, it was the perfect moment for me," McKay says. "First-year graduate students are intellectually receptive. You're searching and open to just about anything. After the first year you have your thesis project and you've focused your effort and energy along specific lines."

Tall, steady, staunchly egalitarian, (continued on page 84)On Mars(continued from page 64) oblivious of social niceties and possessed of an uncommonly analytical mind, McKay became a kind of father figure to a growing cast of Mars enthusiasts. One of the group remembers walking across campus with him one day in the late Seventies when they were stopped by an eager undergrad who recognized McKay as "that Mars guy."

"How long do you think it will take to put humans on Mars?" the student asked.

"About six years," McKay said.

Tom Meyer arrived in Boulder following Stoker. He had met Stoker when she was an undergrad at the University of Utah, where he had been working on the state's seismic-risk network. Inspired by the intrepid capitalist overmen of novelist Ayn Rand, Meyer left the University of Utah to form his own engineering company, which promptly secured a contract to provide instrumentation for robot mining vehicles operating on the ocean floor in three-mile-deep water off Hawaii. Stoker had worked for him on that project before moving to Colorado. When the contract was up, Meyer sold the company and headed to Boulder.

A slender man with a high forehead, long dark hair and black-framed glasses, Meyer brought to the group his devilishly creative mind and a more worldly, practical bent.

He warned the group to avoid the fate of the L5 society, which had seized upon the idea of suspending a permanent city in space at the point between the earth and moon where gravity between the two bodies is at a standoff (known as L5). At that spot, no energy would be needed to keep the city in position. Meyer says, "The L5ers had come up with brilliant, grandiose plans. Very sophisticated stuff--only none of it was grounded in reality. I remember telling the Mars group to learn something from L5. 'Be credible,' I told them."

At roughly the same time, America was backing away from manned space exploration. Still, NASA's blastoffs, splashdowns and moon walks, its bizarre vocabulary of zero-g, A-OK, LEMs and reentry had lit the imagination of an entire generation. The world was enthralled by the drama of its successful thrusts into the new realm of space. For children of the Sixties and Seventies, NASA offered a defining vision of mankind's future. Space was the high frontier. A vision like that doesn't get turned off by a few budget cutbacks and press releases. The space shuttle, NASA's new baby, was basically a truck. It was as if Columbus, having discovered a new world, had taken up a mail route to Bermuda.

So at the same time NASA was recasting itself as a cargo company, the Mars Study Project earnestly worked on getting humans to the red planet. Meyer pursued experiments to see how air, fuel and water could be squeezed from Mars' stingy atmosphere and soil. Penny Boston published a paper called Low Pressure Greenhouses and Plants for a Manned Research Station on Mars and, with Houston space scientist and author James Oberg, gave a seminar on terraforming at the annual Lunar Science Conference in 1979. The group attended a colloquium about Mars at Caltech that year and ran into Carter Emmart. Emmart, then a wiry teenager from New Jersey with braces, hauled around a giant tape recorder with him from session to session, chronicling every word.

"I thought they were the coolest people I had ever seen," says Emmart, who would enroll at the University of Colorado the following year to join the merry band. "I thought that they looked like Fleetwood Mac. The guys had long hair and the girls wore granny dresses down to their bare ankles. They looked like hippies, but they were serious scientists, though they knew how to have serious fun, too. They kind of adopted me. We were all on a secret trip to Mars."

The Mars group decided to host a conference in Boulder in 1981 to solicit input on a host of topics, from how to propel the necessary payloads across hundreds of millions of kilometers of space to how human beings were expected to hold up in tiny pressurized living spaces for years. There would have to be sex in space, right? Should NASA send couples to Mars? Was that asking for trouble? Should it send only married couples? Taking stock of what they didn't know, the group drew up a list of issues: propulsion, design, psychology, medicine, finance, life support, materials processing, Viking results, etc. They then invited those with expertise.

And people came!

"The response was overwhelming," says McKay. "Real people showed up. People such as Conway Snyder, project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab for Viking; NASA engineer Jim French and life-support engineer Phil Quattrone and author Jim Oberg."

Meyer remembers NASA people handing him papers they had worked up privately, without authorization, and asking him not to say where he got them. They called the conference the Case for Mars and distributed red buttons stamped with a logo inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and bearing the words Mars Underground. Attendees were encouraged to wear the buttons under their coat lapels, given the surreptitious nature of the enterprise, and were handed certificates officially inducting them into the Underground, which was defined as "tightly knit but loosely woven."

The second Case for Mars conference, in 1984, attracted hundreds of scientists, including Thomas Paine, the former NASA administrator during the Apollo era who in 1985 would be appointed by President Reagan to head the national Commission on Space (which would make a human outpost on Mars the climax of a 30-year program of space exploration). As the numbers of papers and attendees grew, there was pressure to formalize the Mars Underground, to limit attendance at conferences and to screen the papers to weed out the fringe--like the people who claimed their pixel-enhanced Viking photos showed a gigantic Martian sphinxlike monument of a face, or those who insisted Mars could be reached in minutes once the spaceship achieved "warp speed." But McKay, true to his democratic instincts, refused. "My approach had its drawbacks," he admits, but his inclusiveness also paid off. It opened the door to Bob Zubrin. A Brooklyn native, Zubrin had been teaching math and science to only marginally interested students. He urged them to consider science as the noblest and most exciting of callings.

"Then how come you're not a scientist?" one boy asked him.

The question continued to gnaw at him, until he quit his job and went back to graduate school. Budding space scientist Zubrin was one of more than a thousand people in the audience when Carl Sagan gave the keynote address at the third Mars conference, in 1987.

Three years later, Zubrin had figured out how to get there.

McKay, Boston, Stoker, Meyer, Welch and Emmart were established now. McKay and Stoker held important jobs with NASA at the Ames Research Center in California, helping direct the agency's renewing interest in (continued on page 104)On Mars(continued from page 84) exploring the solar system. Boston had worked for NASA but left to form her own nonprofit corporation. She also was an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico and a visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Welch was a highly regarded lab instrumentation engineer. Meyer owned an engineering firm and was a professional research assistant at the university. Emmart was a skilled technical artist at Ames Research, specializing in Mars mission concepts, when he wasn't working on a picture book that featured his collection of Barbie dolls. Mars wasn't just a pipe dream anymore.

"The problem with the mission plans up to that point," Zubrin says, "was that they were focused on realizing the science fiction vision of the giant interplanetary spaceship rather than actually getting to Mars or doing anything useful on arrival."

Until then, the sketchy NASA Mars plans, based in part on some of the early Mars Underground labor, called for huge cycling spaceships that would move in a perpetual orbit between earth and Mars around the sun. The group envisioned assembling giant spacecraft at NASA's proposed space stations; the space agency wanted moon bases with launching requirements that were minimal compared with earth's; and a fleet of ambitious space vessels to make the initial journey (arguing that this would assure the necessary redundancy and space rescue capability demanded of a long-term mission). The crew would have to be extensively trained for what were claimed to be the most stressful conditions ever voluntarily experienced by travelers. To transport them, the ships would have to be spacious, triple-shielded from harmful radiation and spinning on a central axis to provide artificial gravity--hence avoiding the hazards of long-term weightlessness. Zubrin saw that such a project would keep getting pushed into the future because it was simply too expensive. His scorn for these notions comes out in his shorthand designations for them: the Battlestar Galactica Plan and the Queen Elizabeth Galactica Megaplan.

"The fact that it would take forever to get to Mars that way doesn't matter because the room service would be wonderful," he says.

In 1989 President George Bush said America ought to go to Mars soon, but the plan NASA came up with had a price tag of $450 billion. Zubrin calls that proposal "idiotic." Placing the enormous expense and design problems up front meant any Mars project was doomed.

"It was like saying to Columbus, 'Why risk your life on a ship? Why not just wait until we have a bridge?'" Zubrin says. "I believe we will eventually have the cycler and the fancy spaceships, but only after we have established a human settlement on Mars. There was no need for the Brooklyn Bridge until there were enough people in Manhattan and Brooklyn who wanted to get to the other side."

Apollo had conditioned space scientists and the agency to discount "sprint missions" to Mars. The red planet was not just a "flags and footprints" destination. Instead, people were thinking in terms of big, long-term projects. Zubrin, who by now had earned two master's degrees and was working for Martin Marietta, had his first revelation. One of the design problems for a Mars craft was building a ship big enough to carry both a crew and a fully fueled return vessel. It occurred to the young engineer as he sat up at night in his home office that the return vessel could not only be launched separately but years in advance of the crew. A second revelation followed. A key way to reduce mission weight and cost would be to manufacture the return propellant on Mars. But the absence of hydrogen on Mars prohibited this manufacture. Why not just take the hydrogen along? It was extremely lightweight and accounted for only about five percent of the fuel mix. NASA could send the return vessel to Mars first, with the hydrogen, and then monitor it from earth as it robotically manufactured fuel. (Hydrogen would react with the planet's carbon dioxide atmosphere to make methane and water. The water would be split into oxygen and hydrogen.) That way there would be a fully fueled return vehicle waiting for the crew when it arrived on Mars.

Zubrin's plan was essentially a sprint mission with a permanent goal: getting there. Establish a foothold, he said, and build from there.

The plan called for launching a new Ares booster assembled from the space shuttle's engines and solid boosters. Its empty return vehicle would land robotically on Mars six months later and begin manufacturing methane-and-oxygen rocket fuel. When instruments indicated that the return vessel's tanks were filled with methane and oxygen, NASA would launch two more rockets to Mars. One of these two boosters would carry a second return vehicle, and the other would carry a crew of four astronauts.

On Mars, the astronauts would live and work for more than a year, moving between the three habitats on the surface (the two return vehicles and their original ship). They would leave behind the first Mars base, a habitation module containing their living quarters, as well as a greenhouse, power and chemical plants and a store of scientific instruments. The next crew would arrive shortly after the first crew returned, and add on to the Mars base.

"We gradually develop a string of minibases on Mars, which grow naturally into a full-scale human settlement," says Zubrin. A key convert to this plan would be McKay.

"I was especially impressed with the idea of taking the hydrogen along," says McKay. "It was so simple. To that point, we had been devising complex answers to the problem of manufacturing hydrogen on Mars. We were consumed with the idea that everything had to come from Mars. Bob's solution was less elegant, but it got the job done directly."

The grand designs for planetary exploration, the search for traces of life, the Mars colony, the first true Martians (children born on the red planet), terraforming, giant cycling ships to carry people and cargo back and forth--all those would spring from Zubrin's first, stripped-down mission. You don't take the tree to Mars, you take the seed. Zubrin called it Mars Direct.

"I really loved that word," says McKay. "Direct. It's the essence of Bob's brilliance."

Zubrin and his colleague David Baker formally presented the plan to the Mars Underground at the fourth conference, the people Zubrin had admired from a distance for years. "These were exciting people, impressive people," he says. "They had esprit de corps; they had a lot of moxie. I liked them. It was a group I wanted to be a part of." After the presentation, the Underground embraced him.

"We've done it!" Zubrin remembers Boston telling him excitedly. "We're there!"

Well, not exactly. The $40 billion over ten years is still a lot of money at a time when Washington is determined to balance the budget and cut taxes. (concluded on page 108)on mars(continued from page 104) Consider how the times have changed. Project Apollo cost roughly $600 billion (in today's dollars) over eight years--about five percent of the national budget. But back then, Cold War logic compelled the sacrifice. That competitive urgency evaporated with the Soviet Union's collapse. America today faces a confusing world of shifting trade balances and Third World calamity. Zubrin would like to cut the $40 billion cost in half, as proposed in his book The Case for Mars, which sold out its third hardcover printing (a screenplay is in the works). He invokes the ghost of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, arguing that the American character needs a frontier. Zubrin sees space as essential to America's long-term spiritual survival. Such millennial thinking may inspire the next president, who will assume office in 2001. Al Gore is a forward thinker--Zubrin hopes there's a kindred spirit there--but he's covering his political bases. Gore and House Speaker Newt Gingrich have discussed establishing a Mars Prize--a $20 billion award to the first private organization to land a crew on Mars and safely return it to earth.

NASA has adopted Zubrin's plan as a reference point for its Mars planning. In a March press release, the agency announced that Surveyor, scheduled to be launched to Mars in 2001, will carry equipment to perform "an in-situ demonstration test of rocket propellant production using gases in the Martian atmosphere." The red planet is so close that Zubrin can almost taste it. When he presented his proposal in a speech to the National Space Society, the audience gave him a standing ovation, and the host lifted Zubrin's hand over his head like a winning boxer.

"It will happen in my lifetime," he says. "Oh yeah, absolutely. To quote Susan B. Anthony, 'Failure is impossible.' It's impossible because Mars is there. It's the frontier. It's staring NASA and America in the face. We would be less than true to ourselves if we didn't go. Whenever I speak to groups about it, people come up to me afterward and say, 'Why aren't we doing this? This is the sort of thing this country ought to be doing!"

As much as Chris McKay admires Zubrin's engineering genius and promotional zeal, he thinks the Mars Prize and Zubrin's social science rhetoric are a little over-the-top.

"His parallel with the development of the American frontier is wrong," McKay says. "The story of the American West was one of conquest, not of a frontier in the sense of a place like Mars. Humans knew how to live in the Western U.S. long before the white man arrived. It was just a matter of killing off the natives and taking their land. Mars is nothing like that. Mars is a totally foreign, hostile environment."

Deprived of their dream to explore a new planet, McKay and Boston now spend much of their middle-aged careers going to the ends of this one. They are drawn to the most isolated, extreme locations on earth. McKay spends months every year in Antarctica, where he has discovered that the stress of living with a small group of people in confined spaces for long periods can be more difficult than even an extremely frigid environment. He, Boston and other scientists descended 1567 feet into Lechuguilla, the 90-mile-long New Mexico cave carved out by subterranean waters laced with sulfuric acid (Mars is thick with sulfur), rappelling down sheer rock walls, crawling through narrow tunnels--a trip Boston likens to "visiting another planet." And in the coldest, deepest, darkest places, they find life. Boston shows off electron microscope photos of organic material gathered from the sulfuric depths of Lechuguilla. McKay, in his California office, splits open a rock he brought back from Antarctica to show a faint layer of pale-green fuzz, algae thriving inside the stone.

"Viking was hopelessly naive in that respect," Boston says, remembering her disappointment at seeing no Martian giraffes. Since the 1976 mission, an entire field of biology has sprung up around "extremophiles," life-forms that thrive where, just 20 years ago, nobody guessed they could--inside boiling-hot vents on the ocean floor, in volcanic blast zones, in frozen rocks. If life exists on Mars it won't be found growing on the surface. It'll be deep underground, or in rocks--as with the controversial fossil tracings inside the Martian meteorite. "In my heart of hearts, I know those are traces of life," Boston says.

Ultimately, to find life on Mars will mean going there. Boston, who is now in her 40s, has given up hope of doing that herself. "When I was in my 20s, I thought I would be living there by now," she says wistfully.

Meyer works out every day to stay in shape, in case the opportunity arises. Emmart uses his computer graphics skills for scientific visualization at NCAR and is already dreaming of what comes after Mars. McKay is less sanguine. He says he doesn't remember telling anybody Mars could happen in just six years--"I'm not usually the optimistic one of the group." At this point he thinks the chances of it happening in his lifetime are slim.

But all agree it will happen. Exploration is a defining feature of humanity. One of the ways mammals differ from reptiles is in their compulsion to be on the move, to hunt for food, to size up their surroundings. Humans have always spread out to inhabit available space--spreading, in more misanthropic terms, like a fungus. For now, we must learn to live within earth's generous but finite limits. But is the outward adventure really over? In the long term, does humanity huddle here in its small corner of the universe and wait for the next asteroid impact, or for the eventual demise of the sun?

Ultimately, survival will compel our species to spread out. First to Mars, then beyond. The question for us is, do we want to be alive to see it?

"There's no urgency," says McKay. He is content to know that whenever the voyage is made, his fingerprints will be on it. "People forget that Apollo was in a race to the moon. The idea was to get there first. Getting to Mars is more like a marriage. It's a long-term project involving international cooperation. The object of a marriage is not to get to the end as fast as possible. Mars isn't going anywhere. When the circumstances are right, it will happen, and we'll be ready."

For Zubrin, greatness lies in more than being ready. His charisma has bound together the group's years of work and moved it to a new level of interest and acceptance. There are some in the Underground who grumble that Zubrin, who expropriated the phrase Case for Mars for the title of his book, is becoming bigger than the movement. But mostly, the group is magnanimous. Zubrin is good for Mars. His spirit is infectious. As he wound down his oration to the National Space Society, feeling that hushed hall of eager ears fully alive to his words, the former Brooklyn schoolteacher invoked the funeral oration of Pericles, telling the crowd that if America seizes its moment, if America builds the first extraplanetary colony in this generation: "Future ages will wonder at us, even as the present age wonders at us now."

The Plan NASA came up with had a price tag of $450 billion. Zubrin calls that proposal "indiotic."

On Mars, the astronauts would live for more than a year, moving between three habitats on the surface.

If life exists on Mars it won't be found growing on the surface. It'll be deep underground, or in rocks.