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by
The Free Press, 1997
Reviewed by
For most of recorded history, adventurers, opportunists, and social misfits have pushed the boundaries of civilization, staking out claims in wild and unsettled lands. In doing so, the Old World benefited tremendously from the technological, civil, cultural, and economic advances created out of necessity in the New World.
The most recent example is the forward momentum propelled by more than 400 years of exploration and settlement of the New World that took humans from the ships of Christopher Columbus to the Apollo spacecraft of Buzz Aldrin. In the past few decades, however, this push seems to have disappeared. We've gone to the moon, we've sent satellites into space, and a few entrepreneurs have elaborate plans for an orbiting hotel, but the desire to seek out lands unknown appears to have been ceded to the realm of Hollywood and fiction writers.
That, at least, is the view of Robert Zubrin, founder of a space-exploration research and development firm and author of numerous articles and books on why humans must go to space. Zubrin is virtually a one-man cheerleading team urging the human race to step off this planet and onto a world unknown. In this case, Mars.
Manned exploration of the red planet, along with its eventual colonization, is not a pie-in-distant-sky dream. In his book The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Zubrin details the current technology that makes manned flights to Mars possible as well as economically practical. Once there, he writes, setting up permanent settlements on Mars is simply a matter of "living off the land."
The book serves two purposes: as inspiration to fire up interest in exploring and colonizing this newest frontier, and as a technical manual for how this exploration can be done using available technology.
Zubrin begins his book with a short introduction about why we should go to Mars. First, we need to rekindle our collective curiosity and pioneering spirit. And Mars is the logical starting point, more so than the Moon, Zubrin argues, because Mars possesses the basic elements that would make survival possible.
Unique among the extraterrestrial bodies of our solar system, Mars is endowed with all the resources needed to support not only life but the actual development of a technological civilization.
Mars, once warm and wet, still retains its water, now locked into its reddish soil as permafrost. The other basics of life - carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen - are all available in the rocks, the soil, and the atmosphere.
A reader without a solid background in chemistry might find daunting the author's detailed breakdown of the likely composition of Martian soil, rock, and air, and his explanation of extracting these elements might seem mind-boggling. But the book was written for the general audience, and its overall thesis is enlightening. The typical reader will never look at a clod of dirt - either Martian or terrestrial - in quite the same way again. It is easy to overlook the richness of our world until someone points out the compounds and building blocks that make another world as rich and, in the case of some elements, even richer.
He scoffs at NASA's $450 billion, 30-year Space Exploration Initiative. The proposal details plans to build a low Earth orbit space station, from which missions to Mars will be launched. Zubrin calls this unnecessary and overly expensive. Building a space station that would be used to build space ships is, frankly, ridiculous, according to Zubrin. This would expose workers to solar radiation and the problems associated with living in zero gravity. Plus, a space station never having been built before, too much money would be lost in research and development that would have little value to the ultimate goal: Mars.
The same goes for lunar stations, he argues. The Moon is a cold, dead world. In contrast, Mars may appear frozen and dead, but current exploration reveals it to be rich in potential that only needs to be tapped. To do this, we need to be on Mars; we need to explore its canyons, dried riverbeds, volcanoes, and soil by walking and analyzing the length and breadth of the red world.
Instead of using money to create new technology that would allow us to build distracting space and lunar stations, Zubrin proposes a $30 billion to $50 billion, 10-year plan that will send us directly from Earth to Mars and will make each successive trip easier and cheaper. Using Saturn V booster rockets and other Apollo-era technology, we can send manned flights to Mars, bypassing unneeded low Earth orbit or lunar bases. Thus the name of his plan is "Mars Direct."
The core of his plan is first to send unmanned ships to Mars. These explorers would scout out the best future landing sites as well as go to work making fuel for the return trip. Once this process is completed, a manned ship would journey to the planet and land on its surface. The astronauts would explore the new world for up to 100 days and then return to Earth using fuel generated from the planet itself.
The early crew would be minimal - probably four people - to save money and to put as few people as possible at risk. We are, after all, sending people millions of kilometers away from home for about three years. No matter how carefully scientists plan, it will be a risky proposition.
But once the missions begin, each successive launching will be cheaper and our knowledge will increase exponentially. While the first crew explores the Martian surface, a second unmanned Earth return vehicle would be sent to the planet to explore another site before making the fuel for the return trip of a future manned flight. Eventually, the explorers would congregate at a single base, which would grow into the first Martian settlement, then town and, perhaps, colonial city. Within a century, according to Zubrin's plan, a human outpost would be thriving in a new world, and the next stage of human advancement will have begun.
Of course, none of this is as easy as it sounds, and most of the rest of Zubrin's book is dedicated to discussing the technology, the equipment, the flight plans, the pros, the cons, the difficulties, and the life-threatening risks involved in moving to Mars.
The final chapters of Zubrin's book delve into the science of terraforming - literally transforming the land. He hypothesizes that colonists could turn Mars from a cold and arid world to one lush with running water, warmth, and abundant flora. This would start by using the "greenhouse effect" to increase the density of the atmosphere and warm the temperature from frigid to temperate.
If anyone is qualified to write this book, it is Zubrin. In the past few years he has emerged as the foremost authority on how to explore Mars and he has become the chief crusader for its colonization. Formerly a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, Zubrin is the founder of Pioneer Astronautics, a space-exploration research and development company. He also is the chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society and the author of more than 100 articles on space exploration.
But as he notes time and again, technology - or the lack thereof - is not the greatest threat to a manned Mars mission. The threat lies within ourselves, our fears, and our political maneuverings. "The main public complaint about the space program isn't that is costs too much; it's that the program is not going anywhere," he writes. "People feel betrayed, not by NASA, but by the politicians."
But we still need to go; as a nation and as a world we need to break the confines of our planet and begin to explore the vast richness of the universe, Zubrin states. During the 400 years that the New World was open to exploration and settlement, technological and cultural advances occurred at an ever greater pace, he believes. Humans need this spark to stay sharp, to keep growing and changing, and to avoid the stagnation and death that comes when we lose an outlet for our restless spirit. And if we are to go to Mars, we need to go while we still possess that spirit.
Keena D. Lykins is an award-winning writer and editor with more than 10 years of experience in journalism.
Mars is harsh. Its settlers will need not only technology, but the scientific outlook, creativity and free-thinking inventiveness that stands behind it. Mars will not allow itself to be settled by people from a static society - those people won't have what it takes. Mars today waits for the children of the old frontier. But Mars will not wait forever.
"A New Martian Frontier: Recapturing the Soul of America" - The last chapter of The Case for Mars. For other writing by Robert Zubrin, many papers may be found at the Mars Direct Home Page.
Life on Mars - tracks news and breaking developments, and provides pointers to other online resources on the ongoing search for life on Mars. The announcement by NASA of the possible discovery of signs of early life on Mars could prove one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Confirmation of these findings will take time, and a careful analysis of the available data.
Today at NASA - one of Yahoo's Cool Sites; summarizes programs and events at the government agency, including a detailed and captivating chronology with accompanying links of previous and current efforts of planetary exploration.
Mars Global Survey Project Home Page - NASA's up-to-date information on the project that is the first step of eventual exploration and colonization of Mars.
Mars Today - Want to talk about the weather . . . on Mars? Created by Howard Houben of the Mars Global Circulation Model group, this site is a poster produced daily by the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA's Ames Research Center, depicting current conditions on Mars and its relationship to Earth.
"Water Vapor Adsorption Reactor (WAVAR) For Martian In Situ Resource Utilization." - an award-winning paper on a device to extract water vapor from the Martian atmosphere. Water is the most crucial of all the resources needed for permanent settlement on Mars.
You may purchase this book (hardcover, 318 pp.) directly from:
