Alumni Gazette

Next Stop: Mars

You could call summer 2003 “the summer of Mars.” Probes were launched to the red planet by Japan, the European Space Agency, and NASA. In August, the planet was the closest it’s been to Earth in 60,000 years, prompting amateur stargazers to point their telescopes heavenward to catch a glimpse of the mysterious planet.

The European Space Agency’s British probe and NASA’s two Mars Rovers are expected to reach their destination by January. For Robert Zubrin ’74, that isn’t fast enough.

“[In the 1980s] I went to a conference about Mars,” says the founder of the international Mars Society, “and there were so many challenges for getting there. But I thought ‘this is it.’ If you had asked me when I was 10 years old what I wanted to do, I would have said I wanted to do this.”

Zubrin, a math major and physics minor at Rochester, believes that traveling light is the key. He developed a plan, called “Mars Direct,” that got NASA’s attention in 1990. The opposite of what Zubrin calls the “Battlestar Galactica” approach—taking along everything necessary to get there and back—his plan recommends using the resources on Mars to create fuel to get back to Earth.

“Really, it’s based on 19th-century chemical engineering,” he says.

His 1996 book, The Case for Mars, drew 4,000 letters asking, “How do we make this happen?” The response prompted Zubrin to found the Mars Society in 1998. The first meeting, to discuss the question, was attended by 700 people. Now there are 80 chapters in 41 countries.

An independent organization based in Boulder, Colorado, the organization promotes the exploration of Mars within a decade and colonization within several hundred years.

With $1 million in private funds supplied by individual donors and companies as diverse as the Discovery Channel and the Sheetmetal Workers’ Union, the members of the society work to “get the word out,” as Zubrin says, but more important, to conduct experiments on what human existence would be like on Mars. The group has built simulated environments, staffed by volunteer team members, in the American desert and the Arctic Circle; the newest module will be in Iceland.

Zubrin considers exploring Mars somewhat of a higher calling. It’s not just about finding evidence of life or water, he says.

“This is an invitation to adventure.

“We lack ambition right now—nobody’s dreaming or working toward a goal. This is not a time of optimism and working toward a better world. Kennedy had his ‘New Frontier’; we don’t have a vision now. But opening up a new world . . . that would give kids a chance to work toward something. The challenge now is not to beat another country, like it was during the Cold War, but to exceed ourselves.”