Society creates its own space

Book recounts effort to simulate Mars on island in Arctic

Steve Ruskin, Special To The News

Published January 8, 2004 at midnight

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If the idea of a manned colony on Mars still seems like science fiction to most people, Robert Zubrin holds exactly the opposite view: "We should have been on Mars already."

Zubrin, a founding member of the Colorado-based Mars Society, has been planning that mission for years. Most recently, from 1999 to 2002, Zubrin and the Mars Society carried out their "Mars on Earth" program - re-creating as closely as possible on Earth the conditions human pioneers would encounter on Mars.

This project is the focus of his new book, Mars on Earth: The Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic.

With the recent successful landing of the Mars Rover Spirit, the White House's recent indication that the president soon may announce a new national strategy for space exploration (which could include a manned mission to Mars), Zubrin's book and the efforts of the Mars Society could not be more timely.

Calling their effort "Mars analog research," Zubrin and members of the Mars Society scouted our own planet for locations that most closely resemble the surface conditions of Mars. They chose as a primary location Haughton Crater, a rocky, barren section of Devon Island in the Canadian Artic.

There they built a base station (the "Mars Arctic Research Station," or MARS), donned space suits, and simulated Martian exploration, doing actual geological and bio-geological research on Devon Island. Along the way, they battled harsh weather, the destruction of crucial gear, and even the occasional polar bear.

Zubrin, the author of numerous books on colonizing space, was an astronautical engineer for Lockheed Martin who was intimately involved with NASA. He and the Mars Society, founded in 1998 in the Glenn Miller Ballroom on the University of Colorado campus, are now working at the fringes of established space programs.

Zubrin likens the Mars Society's vision of a manned Martian colony to the 19th-century Mormons who settled in the Salt Lake basin. Like the Mormons, who sought an empty space in which to create their own social order, those who would colonize Mars would be exercising their "right to cut one's own path and make one's own world."

In that sense, Zubrin's libertarian-friendly pronouncements and zeal for establishing a Martian colony reminds us of 19th-century planners of political or religious utopias - colonies carved out of an unpopulated wilderness where the ideals of a group of like-minded people could form the basis of a new society.

NASA's current volley of unmanned Mars missions is useful, Zubrin admits. Yet only a manned mission is best suited to resolve the question of whether life exists, or has ever existed, on Mars. And in the end, as Zubrin sees it, the cost and time of unmanned missions only delays humanity's great destiny: to finally become a space-faring species.

Mars on Earth is a manifesto, filled cover to cover with one man's passion to put human explorers on Mars. Those interested in the vision and the reality of manned Mars exploration, both now and in the future, will not be disappointed.

Steve Ruskin, Ph.D., lives in Colorado Springs. His book on 19th-century scientific exploration will be published by Ashgate in May.

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