Mars Society Concepts

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

by Michael Shermer · 8 Apr 2020 · 677pp · 121,255 words

as a feeble government.” How can we avoid establishing feeble government on Mars? I put the question to Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer, President of the Mars Society, author of The Case for Mars and The Case for Space, and one of the most visionary scientists I have ever known. “I’m not

Case for Mars

by Robert Zubrin · 27 Jun 2011 · 437pp · 126,860 words

identified a group of close to 40 million. Yet, the three main domestic space activist organizations, the National Space Society, the Planetary Society, and the Mars Society, boast a total of perhaps 100,000 members. We have immense latent support for space exploration in this country, but only a tiny fraction of

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are basically four organizations to choose from. I’m a bit prejudiced here because I happen to be a leader of one of them, the Mars Society. But I’ll try to give you an accurate enough picture to decide where you should center your efforts. The Planetary Society is the largest

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conference per year. You can join the Space Frontier Foundation by sending $25 to: The Space Frontier Foundation, 16 First Avenue, Nyack, NY 10960. The Mars Society is the newest of the space organizations. Together with many other members of the Mars Underground, including Chris McKay, Carol Stoker, and Tom Meyer, as

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well as science fiction authors Greg Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson, I founded the Mars Society with the purpose of furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means. Our founding convention in Boulder, Colorado, in August

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desert on Canada’s Devon Island. International conventions are planned for every August. You can join the Mars Society either through its web site at www.marssociety.org or by sending $50 ($25 for students) to Mars Society, Box 273, Indian Hills, CO 80454. If you want to reach me, you can write in

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care of the Mars Society address above. If you want to help, I’d like you to send me a postcard

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so I can put you on the Mars Society mailing list. Be sure to include your e-mail address if you have one. If you have access to the internet, I have a web

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility

by Robert Zubrin · 30 Apr 2019 · 452pp · 126,310 words

and emails from a wide variety of people and, ultimately, the formation of an organization, known as the Mars Society, devoted to making the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet a reality. The Mars Society engages in public outreach, political work, and private projects, the most important of which have been the

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to spend a day with me at my company near Denver afterward. This kicked off a very productive interaction. Musk donated $100,000 to the Mars Society, which helped us fund the deployment of our Mars Desert Research Station, and he joined our board of directors for a while. He took a

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keen interest in the Mars Society's concept for the “Translife” (later “Mars Gravity”) mission to fly a group of mice to orbit in a rotating capsule which would provide them

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work out or move fast enough, got bored and moved on. Figure 1.2. The author and Elon Musk at the Mars Society convention in Pasadena in 2012. Image courtesy of the Mars Society. But Musk was different. He didn't just put some money into SpaceX. He devoted his mind, his heart, and

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Return Vehicle, and a piloted habitat. Inflatable hab modules are used to add ample living space to the Dragon capsules. Image courtesy of Michael Carroll, Mars Society. I was among the thousands of people in the room (and many more watching online) when Musk gave his remarkable presentation, and I was struck

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are basically four organizations to choose from. I'm a bit prejudiced here because I happen to be a leader of one of them, the Mars Society. But I'll try to give you an accurate enough picture to decide where you should center your efforts. The Planetary Society is the largest

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Frontier Foundation by sending $25 to The Space Frontier Foundation, 16 First Avenue, Nyack, NY 10960. For more information, go to www.spacefrontier.org. The Mars Society is the newest of the space organizations. Together with many other members of the Mars Underground, including Chris McKay, Carol Stoker, and Tom Meyer, as

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well as science fiction authors Greg Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson, I founded the Mars Society with the purpose of furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means. Our founding convention in Boulder, Colorado, in August

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national television—has helped make the vision of human exploration of our neighbor world tangible to hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The Mars Society holds its international convention every August. You can join either through our website at www.marssociety.org or by sending $50 ($25 for students) to

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Mars Society, 11111 W. 8th Ave., Unit A, Lakewood, CO 80215. If you want to reach me, you can write in care of the Mars Society address above. If you want to help, sign up at the website so we

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can put you on the Mars Society electronic mailing list. If you join the Mars Society, you will also get access to our online library. You can get a fair number of my technical papers there, as well as those of

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courtesy of Rocket Lab. Plate 5. Mars Direct surface base. Habitation module is at left, energy recovery ventilator at right. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 6. Once SpaceX implements its plans to refuel upper stages on orbit, the nowoperational Falcon Heavy will have greater trans-Mars throw capability than

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be born and families will be raised on Mars, the first true colonists of a new branch of human civilization. Image courtesy of Robert Murray, Mars Society. Plate 9. SpaceX illustration of its proposed 2023 artists’ cruise around the moon. Provided the musicians are up to it, voyages to near-Earth asteroids

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thirty-six years, a beneficial effect of rising global CO2 levels. But what is happening in the oceans? Image courtesy of NASA. Plate 16. The Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station sits on the edge of the twenty-three-kilometer-diameter Haughton Crater made by the strike of an asteroid

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two kilometers in size, on Canada's Devon Island thirty-nine million years ago. The impact energy was two billion kilotons. FOUNDING DECLARATION OF THE MARS SOCIETY The time has come for humanity to journey to Mars. We're ready. Though Mars is distant, we are far better prepared today to send

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therefore that the exploration and settlement of Mars is one of the greatest human endeavors possible in our time, we have gathered to found this Mars Society, understanding that even the best ideas for human action are never inevitable, but must be planned, advocated, and achieved by hard work. We call upon

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. We shall not rest until it succeeds. The above declaration was signed and ratified by the seven hundred attendees at the Founding Convention of the Mars Society, held August 13–16, 1998, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. If you agree, I invite you to join. Further information is available

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at www.marssociety.org or by writing the Mars Society, 11111 W. 8th Ave., Unit A, Lakewood, CO 80215. ∆V: See delta-V. aerobraking: A spacecraft maneuver using friction with a planetary atmosphere to decelerate

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: Free Press, 2011). 3. Wikipedia, s.v. “Mars Gravity Biosatellite,” last modified October 26, 2018, 14:23, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite; “Mars Society Launches Translife Mission,” Spaceref, August 30, 2001, http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=5881 (accessed October 14, 2018); “Translife Mission Experiment Sees Mice

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, 160–61, 188, 193 fission propulsion systems, 185–89 (see also NEP [Nuclear Electric Propulsion] systems; NTR [nuclear thermal rocket]) Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (Mars Society), plate 16 fluorocarbon super greenhouse gases (CF), 117 perfluoromethane (CF4), 218, 219 Focus Section chemistry for space settlers, 145–50 Drake Equation, mistakes in, 263

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delta-V needed to leave LEO and go to, 92–93, 107, 131 Earth-Mars length of trip, 109 European programs, 13 Founding Declaration of Mars Society, 335–37 life on, 13, 104, 120, 255 ways to learn about origins of life on Earth, 254–55 NASA's programs, 13, 14, 30

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Orbiter (MRO) (NASA), 14, 106, 148, 182, 257 Mars Sample Return (MSR), 121, 148 MSR-ISPP (Mars Sample Return employing in situ propellant production), 342 Mars Society, 30–31, 32, 332, 333–34 Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, plate 16 Founding Declaration, 335–37 Mars Underground, 333 Martin Marietta, 22, 146. See

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, 30, 31, 101, 141, 217–18, 222–23, 297 on complexity theory applied to the universe, 262–63 email on terraforming Mars, 219 and the Mars Society, 30–31, 32, 332, 333–34 memo on Mini BFR, 110–12 on SpaceX ITS plan, 109–10 vision for the year 2069, 317 vision

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars

by Nicky Jenner · 5 Apr 2017 · 294pp · 87,986 words

1492, they’ll tell me, “Well Columbus sailed in 1492”, and that is correct, he did,’ said engineer Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society and one of the most outspoken proponents of the manned exploration of Mars, in 2014. ‘But that’s not the only thing that happened in

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World

by Oliver Morton · 15 Feb 2003 · 409pp · 129,423 words

of readers wrote to him eager to become Periclean heroes to future generations, Zubrin set up a new organization of his own, the Mars Society. The founding convention of the Mars Society took place in Boulder in 1998. In some ways it was a successor to the series of Case for Mars conferences, which

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pretensions as exploded as Mars Observer and no real progress to report since Viking, they were back to the little rooms under the arena. The Mars Society convention retook the Memorial Center in high style, bringing in perhaps seven hundred people, mostly from America but some from farther off, most of whom

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history suggests that, without such a need, manned space programs languish. Zubrin’s ideas about reopening the frontier are compelling to many members of the Mars Society, but there are two problems inherent in trying to make them sound like an urgent national need. The first is that the frontier thesis, while

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play up to the resentments of those who think the world is against them. There was a lot of rather sweet idealism at that first Mars Society convention, but there was also a fair amount of resentment. Some of it was the resentment of a child denied: These were people who, growing

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can hardly make a case that it’s the best way to do so—or the quickest. These resentments add an ironic twist to the Mars Society’s attitudes toward government. Their mindset is largely that of people who want government to get out of their way. But in practical terms the

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: It is the way. No one will get to Mars without some government or other footing most of the bill. Many people at that first Mars Society convention, and since, have tried to find a way around this fact. They’ve talked of sponsorship deals with media companies, of private philanthropy, of

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the world simply by humbling government’s last redoubt. Whatever you think of this line of argument, it has one drawback as far as most Mars Society members are concerned: It’s not going to put people onto Mars any time soon. Sponsors are not going to provide billions of dollars up

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that this would be a good way to go to Mars. *Rather priggishly, perhaps, I waived the opportunity to become a founding member of the Mars Society on the basis of a need for objectivity in reporting on it. But I don’t imagine you will be shocked to hear that if

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man, look at those cavemen go. It’s the freakiest show. —David Bowie, “Life on Mars” Since the founding convention in Boulder in 1998, the Mars Society has been busy. Its chapters have lobbied for the funding of robotic Mars missions; there have been annual conventions, spirited arguments over the right way

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. With impressive determination, Lee turned this insight into the NASA-funded Haughton-Mars Project (HMP), which is run out of the Ames Research Center. The Mars Society’s activities in Haughton now run in parallel with the HMP’s main scientific program. Part of that program is studying Haughton. The other part

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be adapted. He’s watched as more and more of the crater’s features have been named. Some naming is serious: The ridge that the Mars Society’s Flashline hab stands on is called Haynes Ridge in memory of Robert Haynes, a Canadian biologist with a strong interest in Mars who died

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presence. The little rubber dinghy used for sampling the lakes is the Research Vessel Mini-Me. In the summer of 2000 the addition of the Mars Society’s Flashline Station, a two-story cylinder that can house six people, raised the Mars simulations at Haughton to a new level; but it started

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that left Zubrin aglow. This was the true spirit of the frontier—what robots could have done such a thing? For a few brief days, Mars Society members occupied their outpost under the command of Carol Stoker and imagined themselves on Mars, to the extent that such a feat was possible given

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is not on Earth any more.” If it sounds like a game of make-believe, well, in a sense so it was. So is the Mars Society’s competition to design a rover simulator that could also be used for such studies, and so are its plans for a communications relay on

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is one of the things that Haughton’s culture prizes most highly). But, at the same time, they are serious. They are serious for the Mars Society because they are one of its main conduits to the media. Haughton in general and the Flashline hab in particular were covered quite extensively in

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around them. One idea is to minimize the amount of work that needs to be done in spacesuits in the first place. At the second Mars Society convention in 1999, the film director James Cameron held a capacity audience enthralled with production designs for his forthcoming Mars production (still forthcoming as of

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its first summer, but it had three cameras trained on its occupants—one for the Discovery channel, which had a sponsorship deal, one for the Mars Society Web site, and one for Clancey’s anthropological studies*—not to mention a number of modems all of its own. And this is nothing to

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. And some day a new sort of symbol will be needed to mark the most historic spot: the site of the first landing by humans. Mars Society optimists are sure that day could come within ten years of the decision to go, and so in their best-case world it could be

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brilliant loudmouth speaking only for himself, this contentious view was not much of a problem. Once he was founding president of the Mars Society, though, it became an issue. The Mars Society is an undeniably utopian and escapist organization, and there is nothing wrong with that. As J. R. R. Tolkien once remarked, to

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that lacks a frontier for a utopia of human victory over natural obstacles. But many of those who came to the founding convention of the Mars Society wanted to cherish the environment, not overcome it. Where Zubrin wanted to restart the history of the frontier, they wanted to rewrite it—and to

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lie the preservation of the human world. The war of these world-views was played out on the evening of the second day of the Mars Society’s first convention. The terraforming panel was dominated by people with views as robust as Zubrin’s or even more so: The general tone was

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that, in the end, it is life that we value most highly. Though such ideas may come to have a growing cultural resonance, in the Mars Society at least they are no longer proving divisive. The rhetoric has been toned down: The term “Lebensraum” was only ever used on the fringe (and

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passing reference to the Earth. The late Canadian biologist Robert Haynes—whose name was given to Haynes Ridge at Haughton Crater, the site of the Mars Society’s Flashline hab—coined a more general word for such an undertaking: ecopoiesis, from the Greek roots meaning abode (eco, as in economics or ecology

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(1999). Bob Zubrin’s Frontier The key source here is Zubrin (with Wagner) (1996), supplemented by reporting at the first and second conventions of the Mars Society. Mapping Martians The Haughton Mars Project has an excellent Web site, http://www.arctic-mars.org. Bill Clancey’s papers are at http://home.attnett

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still pretty much authoritative, though some progress (in supergreenhouse gases, most notably) has been made since. Achenbach (1999) captures the great terraforming debate at the Mars Society’s founding convention. The Undiscovere’d Country Patricia Nelson Limerick discussed responses to American deserts in Limerick (1985) and introduced me to Fei Xiaotong’s

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Stories, Faber and Faber Zubrin, Robert (2001) First Landing, Penguin/Putnam Zubrin, Robert and Maggie Zubrin (eds.) (1999) Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the Mars Society, Univelt, San Diego Zubrin, Robert with Richard Wagner (1996) The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Touchstone

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Web site, 32, 237–38, 325 Mars Polar Lander failure, 30–36, 37, 67, 221, 223 landing ellipse, 232 Scott and Amundsen microprobes, 35, 48 Mars Society, 267–72, 269n, 273, 275–77, 278, 279, 309, 310–11 Mars Surveyor program, 67–68, 211 Mars Underground (Hartmann), 297n Mars Underground, 245–46

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 6 Nov 2023 · 490pp · 132,502 words

in government and military documents, political speeches, the National Space Society’s Statement of Philosophy, and is promoted by Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. Jeff Bezos likely got his theory of space settlement from Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, a professor at Princeton whose lectures Bezos attended as a

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internet club with a microsatellite. Part of this is philosophical. Earth-independence is, for many, the primary goal of space settlement. As president of the Mars Society, Dr. Robert Zubrin, recently said in a Reddit AMA, “the purpose of going into space is to create new nations.” That philosophy explains the desire

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–59, 90, 97, 140–42, 344 MARS (Multiple Artificial-gravity Research System), 81 Mars InSight mission, 194 Mars Odyssey Orbiter, 56 Mars One program, 95 Mars Society, 17, 310 Mars-500, 107 Massimino, Mike, 179 McBride, Jon, 41 media sales, 142, 337 medicine, in space, 4, 110 for astronauts, 102 beginning of

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 27 Feb 2012 · 476pp · 118,381 words

space, of course, plus there are other companies with many fewer employees. How about membership organizations? The Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and the Mars Society combined: maybe 100,000 people. If you add them all up—I did this exercise—there are no more than half a million engaged in

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, 198 Soviet achievements and, 122 water on, 48, 134, 138, 201, 227 Mars Express Orbiter, 138 Mars Global Surveyor, 138 Marshall Space Flight Center, 67 Mars Society, 236 mass extinction, 51 McAuliffe, Christa, 243 McDonald’s, 238 McNair, Ron, 234 Mécanique Céleste (Laplace), 117 Mercury (god), 108 Mercury (planet), 52, 115, 118

Space 2.0

by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words

science, was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman, all of whom were major figures in planetary exploration from JPL. The Mars Society started in 1998, operates two Mars-simulation stations in Utah and the Arctic, and promotes the exploration of the Red Planet, as laid out by

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open to all. Address: 60 South Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101 Phone: (626) 793-5100 Email: tps@planetary.org Web: planetary.org THE MARS SOCIETY The Mars Society is focused on enabling and accelerating human exploration of Mars. It holds an annual conference, organizes various other events, and runs two Mars analog research

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Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), 177, 177, 178 Mars OXygen In-situ utilization Experiment (MOXIE), 239, 239 Mars Sample Return, 249 Mars Science Laboratory, 84 The Mars Society, 265, 266 mass, of spacecrafts, 77, 87–88 mass reduction, 122, 123, 123 Maxar Technologies Ltd., 179 medical research, 27–28, 72–76 Mercury program

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell · 13 Apr 2020 · 213pp · 70,742 words

inspirational speech from one Robert Zubrin, a former aerospace engineer at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin who in 1998 had founded an organization called the Mars Society, which advocated for the human settlement of Mars. Leaning toward the camera, eyes wide with a kind of anguished joy, Zubrin whispers urgently as though

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a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” It was Zubrin and the Mars Society that had drawn me to Los Angeles in that late summer of 2018, at a time when the worst wildfires in California history seemed at

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last to be submitting to a weeks-long containment effort. I was attending the Mars Society’s twenty-first annual gathering at the Pasadena Convention Center. The organization had thousands of members, and chapters in twenty-eight countries, and it acted

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. There was a talk by a Lutheran bishop entitled “Is Mars Exploration Virtuous?” (Given that the Lutheran bishop was also a founding member of the Mars Society, I felt confident in predicting that the answer would be yes.) All these questions were in themselves interesting, but what I really wanted to know

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for an age of colonial expansion ran through its pages like a hot shiver. Around the time of his first encounter with Zubrin and the Mars Society, Musk had logged onto NASA’s website and had been appalled to find no detailed plan or timeline for the exploration of Mars. He was

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. The spirit of Manifest Destiny had been deflated or maybe even come to a depressing end, and hardly anyone seemed to care.” At the 2012 Mars Society Convention—in the very room, in fact, where I was now sitting—Musk had received a “Mars Pioneer Award” from Zubrin and had given a

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my phone from my trouser pocket and entered the address into its browser, and I found myself on the website of a cryptocurrency founded by Mars Society members who had intended it to act both as a source of funding for Mars colonization projects and as the eventual colony’s de facto

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson · 11 Sep 2023 · 562pp · 201,502 words

shocked. In his Google searches for more information, he happened across an announcement for a dinner in Silicon Valley hosted by an organization called the Mars Society. That sounds cool, he said to Justine, and he bought a pair of $500 tickets. In fact, he ended up sending in a check for

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greenhouse to Mars. There was, it turned out, a place where he might be able to get one cheaply, or so he thought. Through the Mars Society, Musk heard of a rocket engineer named Jim Cantrell, who had worked on a U.S.–Russian program to decommission missiles. A month after his

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,” he said. “You should give him a call.” Eberhard and Tarpenning had met Musk earlier, when they had gone to hear him speak at a Mars Society meeting in 2001. “I buttonholed him afterwards just to say hi, like a fanboy,” Eberhard recalls. He mentioned that encounter in an email to Musk

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Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science,” Business Insider, Oct. 23, 2014; Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, Oct. 21, 2012; Elon Musk speech, Mars Society, Aug. 3, 2012; Elon Musk, “Risky Business,” IEEEE Spectrum, May 30, 2009; Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year,” Inc., Dec. 2007; Elon Musk, TED Talk

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Machete Kills, 262 Macron, Emmanuel, 567 MAGA, 424 Maheu, Jean-Philippe, 534 “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (Licklider), 399 Mango, Tim, 146–47 Marks, Michael, 165–68 Mars Society, 92, 95, 129 Marver, Jim, 138 Matrix, The, 418, 578 Maxwell, Ghislaine, 296 McAuliffe, Christa, 119, 385 McCarthy, Kevin, 424 McCormick, Kathaleen, 490 McFarland, K

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, 74–75 Zip2 and, 64–65 See also harshness above; personality and unrealistic deadlines and below —MARS MISSION: college years, 51 Gates on, 436–37 Mars Society inspiration for, 92 Optimus and, 485 SpaceX founding and, 92–94, 100, 321 Starlink founding and, 321 Starship system and, 326, 362, 391, 604–5

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, 5, 169, 342 EM’s politics and, 424 dating EM, 70–71 honeymoon, 83 Los Angeles move and, 95 marriage, 68, 72, 72, 169–70 Mars Society and, 92 Mueller and, 108 Nevada’s birth and death and, 103, 104, 171 relations with EM’s family, 70, 88 relationship difficulties, 170–71