The Case for Mars

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, and I’ve been thinking about Mars.

Of course I wasn’t alive to witness Apollo 11, but my parents’ generation was.

They are the generation that was so directly inspired by Apollo. And they are retiring. Unfortunately they were not able to carry the torch their predecessors lit, and we spent the last 40 years in low Earth orbit. Even the expertise and knowledge that fueled the Saturn V rocket is gone, and NASA is spending billions to reproduce it with the Ares V.

I am reminded of the Italian Renaissance architect Brunelleschi, who in the 15th century traveled to Rome to study the great arches and domes of the ancient Roman empire, to learn from his more advanced ancestors.

Now we call Apollo man’s greatest engineering achievement, but with a little bit of sadness, because perhaps that was a peak.

So I’ve been thinking about Mars and in particular about an amazing book I read several years ago by Robert Zubrin called The Case for Mars.

Stephanie bought me the book as a present when we were on a trip to San Francisco. She was pretty pleased with her gift, because I spent the next two days reading and then rereading it. Not exactly how I’d planned to spend that time, but well worth it.

Zubrin was a senior engineer working at Lockheed Martin and later Martin Marietta on propulsion technologies for interplanetary rockets.

In the book, he lays out a plan called Mars Direct to land humans on Mars using current rocket technology. The plan involves sending an unmanned vehicle to the Martian surface to manufacture the fuel necessary to return humans to Earth. Only once the Earth-return vehicle is safely on Mars, fueled, and ready to return home, do the astronauts leave for Mars.

Zubrin describes the technologies and techniques necessary to survive and explore Mars during the 18 months the team would be on the planet’s surface. He goes on to propose an extended colonization effort that would reuse the habitats and structures left behind by previous missions. And he describes techniques that could be used over perhaps 400 years to terraform Mars and make it a habitable environment for humans.

The book is a tour de force. It is not an imaginative exercise but a muscular and impassioned argument for manned missions to Mars from someone who truly believes our future lies in the stars. Robert Zubrin was born in 1952, and he is of the generation that were in their teens when Gemini and Apollo were taking place. The energy and purpose of those times clearly captured him as a young man, and have never let go.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the final chapters, when Zubrin explains why we must go to Mars. I won’t do justice to his arguments, but I’ll try to summarize them here. First, he rejects the moon as a destination because it will never be a home to humans. Its gravity is too weak, it has no atmosphere, it has wild temperature swings, and it is too costly to use it as a staging platform for Mars. Mars by contrast has energy resources, an atmosphere, and is closer in size (and gravity) to Earth.

Zubrin also argues that we must have a new challenge and a new frontier. “NASA was not setup as a nostalgia agency, it was setup as a pioneering agency,” he says. As Earth becomes more connected and homogeneous, and richer, a frontier will create the opportunity for “Martian ingenuity,” and for another society to develop, outside of the reach of Earth’s existing institutions and culture (and its police forces).

You can hear Zubrin argue his points in this episode of NPR’s On Point from last Thursday, or check out his organization, the Mars Society. And Zubrin’s IEEE Spectrum article, How to Go to Mars Right Now, provides a superb summary of his book.

The Case for Mars definitely counts as one of the best books I have read in the last five years. If you had asked me as a child if I thought humans would be on Mars during my lifetime, I would have said definitely yes. Nowadays I’m not as optimistic.

Watching the tributes to Apollo 11 these last few days, I agree that nostalgia shouldn’t be the emotion we associate with manned space exploration. I don’t know if our current government has the will or resources to get us to Mars. But last week, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched their first satellite into orbit on a private rocket called the Falcon 1, developed from-scratch in California, entirely with private funds. SpaceX is a lean, agile company. Their mission control room is eight guys with laptops, and they claim to already be profitable. Musk has said that the mission of SpaceX is to “make humans the first interplanetary species.”

So perhaps there’s hope.