The Mars Delusion

Credits Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London. LONDON — On the corner of a busy gyratory, a bus ride from my house in south London, sits an unremarkable yellow-brick building. Each day, thousands of commuters sweep past this corner on the way to Vauxhall Bridge. Chances are that few would give the building a second glance were it not for the diverting sign that runs between the windows of the lower floors: “BRITISH INTERPLANETARY SOCIETY.” If the Kennedy Space Center is the gleaming capital of space exploration as a national endeavor, then this humble address, “Arthur C. Clarke House,” might be considered the enthusiasts’ spiritual home. Founded in 1933, the society headquartered here is the world’s oldest space advocacy organization. One friend, after learning I was going to visit, told me he’d always suspected it was the sanctum of “space wizards.” Inside its doors one morning in February, I found it occupied by Colin, John and Alistair, who were presently engaged in redecorating the lecture theatre. As his colleagues strained to lug a heavy model of the 1980s British HOTOL spaceplane into the lobby, Jerry Stone took a break to talk to me about settling Mars. For Stone, a 71-year-old “space presenter” and BIS fellow, Mars has always been a fixation. He told me that landing a manned spacecraft on the Red Planet promised to be “a major step in the advancement of humanity,” unlocking any number of secrets about the workings of the universe. Aside from anything else, it was a tantalizing grail. All due respect to Columbus, Magellan and Cook, he told me, “but they didn’t cross millions of miles of space to land on the surface of another world. If that doesn’t excite you, then I don’t know what will.” Upstairs, in the society library, Stone scoured the shelves for books on Mars. Soon, a pile was growing on the reading table — “Next Stop Mars,” “Why Mars,” “Marswalk One,” “Martian Outpost” — containing between them decades of speculation about propulsion systems, habitation blueprints and spacesuit designs. One of the tomes predated Sputnik and included photos depicting the Martian sphere as a nebulous grayscale blob. “Nowadays, people can get better views from telescopes in their back garden,” Stone said. The reality is that people have been yearning to visit that blob for a long time. Men like Stone, who’d grown up with the Apollo missions, just want to reach it. But many of their fellow travelers covet bigger dreams: to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and in so doing, usher in our interplanetary future. For decades, space evangelists have promoted Martian settlement as an insurance policy, a “lifeboat” should human folly or a planet-killing asteroid bring about Earth’s 6th great extinction event. Some have viewed the ambition in more hazy terms, as a logical next step in our species’ evolutionary impulse to expand into uncharted territories. Others have seemed content to echo the less philosophical sentiments of Jeff Bezos, who said, in 2016: “We should, because it’s cool.” Such a mission isn’t short of its big-hitting advocates. In 2019, NASA announced plans to dispatch a first manned mission to Mars in 2033, when orbital paths are most conducive to the shortest round trip. Chinese rocketeers are said to be targeting the same launch window. In his inaugural address in January 2025, President Donald Trump declared that his new administration would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Meanwhile, the real boost for humanity’s Martian aspirations has come from the private sector and its new plutocratic space race. During the ill-fated shuttle missions of the 1980s, the cost of launching an object into space hovered above $54,000 per kilogram of mass. By streamlining production and pioneering reusable launch modules, SpaceX has slashed that cost to around $1,500 per kilogram. In time, this economic trajectory could see space entrepreneurs succeed where the shuttle program failed by making spaceflight routine. Egged on by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s conspicuous if zany advocacy, these advances have renewed optimism that humans will land on the Red Planet and potentially establish a permanent colony in the foreseeable future. In 2024, Musk, who has said he hopes to die on Mars, set out a timeline that seemed suspiciously aligned with his own probable lifespan: “Less than 5 years for uncrewed, less than 10 to land people, maybe a city in 20 years, but for sure in 30, civilization secured.” “For decades, space evangelists have promoted Martian settlement as an insurance policy, a “lifeboat” should human folly or a planet-killing asteroid bring about Earth’s 6th great extinction event.” But now the space community was reeling from an unforeseen volte-face. Two weeks earlier, Musk had turned his attention to a much nearer, and, it could be argued, less exciting celestial body. “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization,” he posted, “and the Moon is faster.” The gray-hairs at the BIS were lamenting the pivot. “I had hoped we’d see humans on Mars in my lifetime,” said Colin Philp, the serving society president. “But it always seems to be 20 years down the line.” I didn’t have the heart to compound their disappointment by revealing my own misgivings. After weeks of reading about the challenges of settling Mars, I was preoccupied with one glaring truth. Mars is an uncompromisingly hostile planet and a dreadful place to be a living organism. According to some critics, the process of establishing a human presence on its surface is likely to make any notional future pioneers who do so progressively irradiated, sick, mad and dead. The Siren’s Call Of The Red Planet If there is a starting point to humanity’s dream of settling Mars, it could be said to begin with a consequential mistranslation. In 1877, a Milanese astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli trained his telescope on our distant neighbor and produced a hand-drawn map depicting a latticework of linear features crisscrossing the planet’s surface. Unsure what they signified, Schiaparelli called them “canali,” meaning “channels.” As news of his discovery reached the Anglosphere, the word was transliterated as “canals,” connoting artificiality, fueling speculation that they must have been engineered by some hitherto invisible hand. In America, Schiaparelli’s schema soon captured the imagination of Percival Lowell, the scion of a Boston textile dynasty, who subsequently established an eponymous observatory on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. As he and his team of Harvard astronomers expanded Schiaparelli’s map, Lowell, a Barnum-esque character prone to monomania, became convinced that the lines he was observing revealed a planet-wide irrigation system carrying water from the polar ice caps down to vegetated equatorial oases. For Lowell, the canals — 20-30 miles wide and averaging 1,500 miles in length — were not just signs of life, but incontrovertible evidence of a peaceable and productive extra-terrestrial civilization. In a series of lectures in 1895, he speculated that Mars must be a realm of titans. Unencumbered by Earthly gravity, “a Martian would be, physically, fifty-fold more efficient than a man,” he claimed. Lowell’s theories were eagerly promulgated by a sensationalist media, which hailed him as a visionary. But by the early 20th century, his notions had been dismissed as illusory, a product of his own wishful thinking as much as the era’s limited telescopic range. More recent commentators have wondered whether the Bostonian, in his obsessive shifts at the eyepiece, may have been recording nothing more than reflections of the capillaries in his own eyes. At the height of the Space Race, in July 1965, NASA launched its first successful Mars probe, Mariner IV, which passed within 6,118 miles of the planet’s surface. The 22 grainy, black-and-white images it beamed back to Earth revealed a barren, cratered husk — presumed near-conclusive proof that Mars was lifeless. For the inheritors of Lowell’s fever-dreams, however, it wouldn’t take long for ideas of pre-existing Martian lifeforms to morph into an alternative vision, already a recurrent theme in science fiction: If Mars was vacant, perhaps it could host a human colony, a first stepping-stone in our species’ interplanetary expansion. How To Settle Mars In his 2024 book, “The New World on Mars,” Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of The Mars Society, provides a definitive how-to guide for establishing a human presence on the Red Planet. Zubrin predicts that the first Martian homesteaders will set out from Earth on some future generation of SpaceX’s “Starship,” scheduling the outward journey to coincide with the moment when orbital mechanics offer the shortest possible trajectory between the two planets. After a voyage of six months, the homesteaders will set down at a predetermined point of settlement, possibly planting their flag somewhere in the vicinity of the Karolev or Milankovic Craters, in the planet’s northern hemisphere, close to its expansive layer of subsurface permafrost. Upon arrival, they will erect a habitable outpost, fabricating living quarters from cannibalized spaceship parts. Their beachhead established, this pioneer colony of 50 to 100 dogged individuals “will then go to work,” Zubrin writes. They will extract Mars’ abundance of raw materials: grinding cement from gypsum; firing bricks from claylike deposits; smelting iron from the rust-red ferric oxide that carpets the entire planet. They will wash and process the Martian scree, or “regolith,” turning it into an aggregate conducive to growing crops. Exhibiting the grit and stolid appetite that will doubtless be inherent to the Martian pioneer, they will derive protein from worms, insects and spirulina algae. “If there is a starting point to humanity’s dream of settling Mars, it could be said to