If you’re like me, you probably got done watching the National Geographic’s Mars series. Not bad for a dramatized thing. Lesson number one: Mars isn’t for sissies. Lesson number two: People are going to get killed and that’s no reason to give up. Lesson number three: Mars doesn’t friggin’ care if you’ve won a Nobel prize and it will not forgive your ego trip or your delusions. Lesson number four: Don’t get into a big blasted hurry, especially when dust storm season is about to get into full swing.

As you might expect, there were a few quibbles. Real flight directors were heard to say that the CapCom is unlikely to be the one who comes up with a scientific or technical solution to a complex problem and they could have come up with more believable malfunctions. Does the fact that you don’t see water ice on Mars’ surface (and you probably wouldn’t) mean that there is no frozen water mixed in with the regolith? An easy way to test for the presence of water is to throw up a tent, heat up the inside and see if the water vapor content rises. Doesn’t take much for the same reason that you put a lid on a pot if you want the water inside to boil faster and you want to keep your helmet on if you don’t want to die in a rather gruesome way on Mars.

Seems to me they should have phoned down and told some of the people trapped in the greenhouse with the crazy botanist to stop him. #MARS

— Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) December 20, 2016

One or more of the crew members in that part of the base could have tried to stop the botanist who opened the greenhouse airlock, but would they have reached him in time? Or did the commander make the right call by trying to evacuate that part of the base? How can we be sure we know the correct answers without any actual experience to draw on?

Maybe a better question to ask is, “How accurate can a show like this be when we’ve never had people actually living on Mars?” Don’t get me wrong, this show was pretty danged accurate from a science perspective. In the accompanying book, Leonard David credits National Geographic for insisting that the scientific and technical side stay as accurate as possible. There really is frozen water on Mars even if you may or may not be able to see it. Any future Mars base really is going to need a source of power other than solar panels to not only survive, but also do any meaningful work during dust storm season. Then it becomes a question of what will be a reasonable social structure for a Mars base.

What kind of backgrounds do you want crew members to have? Do they absolutely need to be pilots, engineers or scientists, or can they be trained for that kind of work? Do you want outgoing personalities, or is it okay for them to be introverted? Do you want incorrigible outdoorsmen, or do you want people who are okay with being indoors most of the time?

Bonus Footage: Before MARS

In @NatGeo #MARS colony, women are the leaders. A noble experiment? When we go to new worlds, we will try everything. What works will last.

— Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) December 20, 2016

Exactly right. “We will try everything. What works will last.” A woman in charge can work if she has all the qualities of a good, experienced leader. It doesn’t matter that she’s female; it doesn’t matter that she’s Asian. Her most important quality was her skill as a base commander. This fictional base commander is the one with actual real world experience on Mars. Maybe she should have done a better job of standing up to the egotistical demands of those two scientists who thought they knew better simply because they had so much time in simulators. However, she’s the one who knows what she’s talking about when she says that messing around with the nuclear power is not a good idea with dust storm season about to get into full swing.

What wouldn’t work on Mars? Pride is a killer. Future Martians will need the humility to admit when they made a wrong choice. They’ll need the humility to acknowledge that something they want might have to wait a while if it even happens at all. You might survive a mistake if you’re lucky and can ration your resources until you can fix the mistake. You won’t survive if you can’t face reality and become so delusional over the consequences of that mistake that you’re going to be the one who opens the airlock in the greenhouse. The base commander can acknowledge that she made the wrong decision when she approved modifications to the nuclear reactor before the dust storm, and the surviving botanist learns how to acknowledge that she should not have pushed so hard for it. That’s a mistake that neither of them will make twice.

#MARS RZ “The history of space travel begins with people being able to see with their minds what others have not yet seen with their eyes.”

— Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) December 20, 2016

Remember how the investors wanted to accelerate development of the Mars base when things were going well? Then they talk about quitting when their decisions come back to bite them in the butt and their “pet” Nobel prize winning scientists push for things that come close to sending the base into the gutter. It takes the intervention of flight controllers and Martians making brilliant decisions and fortunate discoveries to keep things going when things go wrong. It takes the combined effort of people who had the vision of life on Mars practically their entire lives to make sure that the dream of making Homo sapiens a multi-planet species does not die easily.

It does take guts to look beyond the next quarterly report and not dump the whole thing when things aren’t going well. If you brag about being brave with your money, you probably don’t have what it takes. If your business plan includes where you want to be in 2025 and the steps you need to take to get there, you might have what it takes to bankroll the first colony on Mars. Now you just need to find people with “the right stuff” to get you there.

That means hiring the right kind of people who actually believe that the colonization of Mars is important enough to put their lives on the line. As we saw in the Mars series, sending the Nobel prize winning Ph.Ds might not be the brightest idea in the universe. Even sending some of the personalities featured in “The Right Stuff” might not be the best idea if you want to keep the number of fistfights under control – and, yes, you will hear stories about fistfights, sexual harassment and general shenanigans during long-duration Mars simulation missions even if government space agencies do want to keep quiet about that kind of thing.

You’d be better off sending all the incredibly boring people because at least they won’t kill each other. You want the ones who can get the work done without a lot of unnecessary drama, get along reasonably well even when they have the occasional difference of opinion, and avoid panicking even when there’s a fire in the habitat. (And, yes, it is acceptable to stuff yourself into a spacesuit and break out a window if you can’t get to the fire extinguishers or escape a fire any other way. It would just be preferable to have easily replaceable windows if that’s the case.) It doesn’t make for good television, of course, but at least your crews will still be alive when the audiences lose interest.

Robert Zubin answers “Why should we go to Mars?”

#MARS quotes RZ “If we say we can’t do this, then we are no longer the kind of people we used to be, & that is something we cannot afford.”

— Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) December 20, 2016

Kind of a dare there, but there’s no denying that Americans have a history of not shrinking back from the dangerous unknown. They’d load up their covered wagon and head west at the drop of a hat. If they were smart, they wouldn’t have been fooling themselves that it was easy or safe, but they may have seen it as their chance to become landowners or find a few gold nuggets. The Wright Brothers were seen as nuts up until the moment that they got a heavier-than-air contraption to actually fly. Nobody really thought that anyone would actually survive an attempt to claim the Orteig Prize until Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. What they all had in common with Neil Armstrong was that they were all Americans who didn’t shy away from risk.

Did we lose something between the time that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon and now? There wasn’t exactly massive demonstrations in the streets when Nixon nixed the Apollo Program and the Apollo Applications Program largely fell by the wayside in favor of the Space Shuttle – arguably a program that didn’t really accomplish anything beyond going around in very large circles and playing a major part in building the International Space Station.

NASA’s budget is flat and even declining when inflation is factored in. Meanwhile, Obama requested a $582.7 billion Department of Defense budget for Fiscal Year 2017. If NASA could just get half that every year for the next twenty years and get its rear in gear, we’d have respectable bases on both the Moon and Mars by the end of it. That would be something tangible that the American public can show for its tax money, and would also have the fringe benefit of spending money on something other than, you know, our capacity to make war. Not that I’m a complete pacifist, but it is a little hard to build enough nukes to destroy all life on Earth if you’re sending those resources on peaceful space exploration and settlement missions.

(And, yes, false dichtomies like, “Why are we spending so much money on space exploration when we could be feeding the poor,” do annoy me. Every person who is employed by NASA or its contractors is one who isn’t receiving a welfare check or sleeping under a bridge.)

Seriously, though, many space enthusiasts are wondering if NASA has just lost its edge. It’s been called a jobs program that isn’t all that different from every other government agency except for hosting some really cool fireworks displays every once in a while. It hasn’t sent people beyond low Earth orbit in decades. SpaceX wants to do Mars faster and more cheaply, and the promise of reusable rockets might actually make that feasible. Plus, it’s kind of fun to watch Elon Musk get excited about successfully nailing important milestones involved in actually making reusable first stage rocket engines actually happen.

SpaceX Makes History

Can a private organization actually pull off a crewed Mars base? It might be able to if it can find the funding. The fictional National Geographic Mars base was funded by wealthy investors. A real one might reasonably be a joint public-private venture. Insiders with experience on Mars missions like to say that Mars is hard and reliable sources of funding is one of the tricky parts.

The National Geographic Mars series was reasonably realistic if you take into account that it was a partially-fictional documentary. The important parts here are to:

Trust the experienced people on the ground and in the trenches. It’s assumed that the execs and investors already recruited the best people for the job. Now those people need to be able to trust their judgment if they don’t want the embarrassment of explaining why they had to pull out.
Go with what works. Keep what’s effective, let the rest go, and don’t be ashamed of calling for an evacuation if one of your crew members hallucinates and is about to open an airlock. It’s not a failure to save as many lives as possible.
There are very few problems that can’t be solved with a little cleverness, determination and maybe a bit of risk. It’s about keeping on going, one step at a time, when your suit is running low on power and your visor is frosting up. It’s about jury-rigged, make-do solutions when you’ve landed a little too far from where you’re supposed to be, your commander just died and you need to improvise until you find a more permanent place to set up base. It’s about knowing when to unclip your tether and go find that friggin’ nuclear power generator so you can repair it (and maybe not scaring your partner half to death in the process). You do what it takes to survive instead of sitting down and crying about it.
It’s acceptable to resist pressure from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s equally true regardless of whether you’re discussing modifications to the nuclear power generator just before dust storm season or considering the evacuation of the entire base after the deaths of seven crew members.
You might even reach the point where you don’t even want to return to Earth. It feels too much like you’re tucking tail and running just because there were a few casualties. Do you dishonor their sacrifice by giving up, or do you continue to establish Mars as a second home for humanity? Besides, when you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into a massive project like this…

#MARS If you live on Mars, you are home.

— Robert Zubrin (@robert_zubrin) December 20, 2016

Watch The Series

Accompanying Books

More Mars on eBay

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