On to Mars!

While NASA fiddles with robots, a grass-roots movement burns to put human beings on the Red Planet -- soon.

By Rebecca Bryant

Jan 7, 1999 | Last Sunday, NASA's Mars Polar Lander lifted off for an 11-month voyage to the Red Planet, searching for signs of life in its polar icecaps. Robotic missions to Mars are nothing new -- they date back to the Mariner 4 fly-by in 1964. But ever since the Apollo moon missions ended a quarter century ago, the notion of manned exploration of our celestial neighbors has seemed beyond our reach -- more like science fiction than reality.

Today, most of us discount the prospect of a human mission to Mars as far-fetched. I did too -- until a phone call from an old friend four months ago. But over the last several months, through an avid and serious Internet community of Mars devotees, I've learned that their dream, what I'd call "extreme pioneering" -- the exploration and settlement of Mars -- is easily within our technological grasp.

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"I've been through the solar movement and the environmental movement, but I have never experienced such passion," Bruce Anderson's voice quaked. "It was palpable."

The late night call had shrilled through my cottage. After a while, I began to comprehend that, no, my friend had not been to a workshop on tantric sex. Anderson had flown to Boulder, Colo., on Aug. 13, 1998, to join more than 700 people at the founding convention of the Mars Society.

As director of industrial liaisons for MIT, Anderson enjoys a prime view of the technological horizon; he's an aficionado of reality, not science fiction. Moreover, with a long history of environmental activism, he's not inclined to undervalue our present planetary accommodations. So when Bruce revealed the Mars Society's mission -- to establish a human settlement on Mars within 10 years -- my pulse accelerated.

The next day, I opened an investigative file. My first step was to dig out the story of the society's roots in a loose-knit confederation of Mars enthusiasts who called themselves the Mars Underground. Long ago -- about 20 years -- a group of precocious graduate students at the University of Colorado, including Chris McKay and Carol Stoker in astrogeophysics (both now at NASA Ames Research Center and on the Mars Society's steering committee), started a seminar on terraforming Mars -- transforming the planet into a more Earth-like habitat. That led, in April 1981, to the first Mars conference at which enthusiasts bonded as the Mars Underground, sketching plans for human exploration of Mars. The conferences continued every three years; by the third Boulder conference in 1987, there were more than 1,000 attendees. Carl Sagan keynoted.

Members of the Mars Underground thought their efforts had paid off when in 1989 President Bush called for manned missions back to the moon and on to Mars in the 21st century. Responding to the president's bugle, NASA proposed a buffed-up space station, already a pet project of many scientists. At the station, a Galactica-sized spaceship would be constructed for a voyage to Mars "flag and footprints"-style (we came, we saw, we conquered). The estimated cost: $450 billion.

It was a lousy plan with a Neiman Marcus price tag. Splat went the Mars movement.

But NASA's wasn't the only plan around: Robert Zubrin had one, too. Zubrin, a science teacher, attended the second Boulder conference in 1984. The event rekindled his childhood excitement over Sputnik and Kennedy's classic 1961 mission statement: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. By 1989 Zubrin, who'd moved on to become a senior engineer at Martin Marietta, had developed his own strategy for getting to Mars and staying there a while. Pitching his "Mars Direct" plan to NASA and the Mars Underground, Zubrin kept fine-tuning his ideas, eventually writing and publishing the book "The Case for Mars" in 1996.

Next Page: Five years and $20 billion later, we could be on Mars

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