I Walked on Mars : Book 1: The Great Departure

Before Mars: choosing who will leave

An ordinary man is selected for the program that will send the first permanent settlers to Mars. Between psychological screening, technical training, emerging loyalties and a departure with no guaranteed return, this opening volume tells both the preparation of a colony and the transformation of those who agree to leave Earth behind.

In Book 1, this issue is tied directly to the stage being explored: Book One uses fiction to test the consequences of a Mars program; it does not prescribe an actual mission architecture. Fiction is used as a narrative laboratory: it forces technical, human and political constraints to interact instead of being studied in isolation. Whenever the page touches a real-world issue, the linked Mars dossier helps separate documentation from the fictional hypothesis.

This chapter can be extended with selection of future settlers · medical screening and long-term fitness

Selection therefore reaches beyond ranking applicants. A remote settlement cannot be built only from brilliant specialists who are unable to change habits, explain their knowledge or work through disagreement. It needs complementary temperaments, overlapping skills and people who can keep learning. Book One uses this tension to show that a credible Mars program would not simply choose individual heroes; it would try to assemble a group capable of becoming progressively interdependent before distance makes that interdependence unavoidable.

Departure as a human rupture

Before departure and before Mars, the novel lingers on the quiet gestures through which a team becomes a community. During a Christmas scene on the training campus, Stella gives David an object from her family history.

“I opened it. It was an old Texas silk scarf, brown with geometric patterns, soft between my fingers, smooth and warm. Her voice dropped to a whisper: ‘It is old. But it is clean. And it carries a little of where I come from. Keep it. ’ I unfolded it for a moment. I folded it again. I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket, against my shirt. ”

Passage from I Walked on Mars : Book 1: The Great Departure.

The first book follows the phase that many stories of space conquest rush through: recruiting future settlers, medical and psychological examinations, interviews, emergency procedures, team formation and the gradual realization that this is not an ordinary expedition. The candidates are preparing to leave the only world they have ever known and to become the first link in a permanent human presence on Mars.

As the tests move the group closer to launch, they also reveal what each person will have to abandon on Earth. Departure becomes a technical objective, a personal rupture and a collective experience. The novel therefore brings together three strands: realistic anticipation, a human adventure and a love story that develops under the watch of Hermes, the artificial intelligence assigned to study candidates and identify forms of resilience that ordinary recruitment procedures may overlook.

David is deliberately introduced as an ordinary person rather than a born astronaut, allowing the reader to enter the mission through practical experience, endurance and learning rather than specialist status. Before any spacecraft leaves Earth, the candidates must also become a crew: procedures matter, but trust, renunciation, isolation and relationships begin reshaping the future settlers long before Mars, making selection and training part of the adventure itself.

How far can an ordinary life be overturned when an extraordinary project comes knocking?

David is neither an astronaut, nor a celebrated scientist, nor a hero designed for adventure. Yet he is drawn into an international selection program created to recruit the women and men who will found the first permanent human settlement on Mars.

Then come the examinations, interviews, training, procedures, encounters with the other candidates and bonds that no one had planned. Every step brings the group closer to departure, while revealing what they will have to leave behind on Earth.

Blending realistic anticipation, human adventure and a love story, this first volume follows the recruitment, transformation and great departure of people who must learn to survive together before they ever set foot on the Red Planet.

Training is treated as transformation rather than a sequence of tests. Candidates have to master procedures, but they also have to recognize fatigue before it damages judgement, communicate uncertainty and accept that one person’s error can affect everyone. Simulations matter because they create shared reflexes and a common working language. They also reveal whether someone can admit a problem early, ask for help and return to cooperation after conflict—behaviours that become as valuable as technical proficiency on a long mission.

The human beings behind the mission

In 1952, Wernher von Braun published Das Marsprojekt in Germany; its English translation, The Mars Project, appeared in 1953, one of the earliest detailed engineering studies of a human expedition to Mars. It was not conceived as a symbolic flight. It described a large collective undertaking involving several vehicles, substantial crews and a complete interplanetary logistics system.

After Apollo, major American projects extending human exploration beyond the Moon were sharply reduced by political and budgetary decisions. Von Braun moved to strategic planning at NASA Headquarters in 1970 and left the agency in 1972. It would be historically inaccurate to claim that NASA simply “refused Mars” and that this single refusal caused his departure: the retreat from post-Apollo ambitions resulted from a wider combination of public priorities, funding constraints and institutional choices.

More than half a century later, Elon Musk and SpaceX have placed permanent human settlement on Mars at the centre of an industrial programme. Starship is presented as a system intended to carry crews and large quantities of cargo, with the stated long-term objective of enabling a self-sustaining Martian city.

Leaving Earth introduces a rupture technology cannot remove. Communication may remain possible, yet loved ones stay on another planet and return cannot be treated as an immediate option. The novel gives this dimension weight because it changes the meaning of consent. Departure becomes a long-term alteration of personal life, relationships and the sense of time itself. A Mars mission is therefore not only a professional assignment but a biographical decision whose consequences begin long before the vehicle leaves the ground.

From individual expertise to collective redundancy

This transition (from an engineering concept to the possibility that our generation may witness the first departures)helped shape I Walked on Mars. The series imagines how the first women and men would be recruited, selected and trained; how they would travel; how Arcadia would be built; and how a society separated from Earth would make political choices of its own.

NASA : The Mars Project · NASA : Wernher von Braun biography · SpaceX : Mars programme

A settlement-bound crew also has to accept that expertise will overlap. The best specialist may be unavailable, injured or occupied elsewhere, so knowledge must circulate before departure. In Book One, training is not only a test of performance; it is the slow construction of a group in which people learn enough about one another’s roles to remain useful when the normal chain of responsibility breaks.

Pressure makes human relationships part of the mission system. Affection, rivalry, intimacy and disagreement are not distractions from technical work; they influence whether information moves, whether fatigue is noticed and whether people trust one another enough to report mistakes. A crew may possess every planned piece of hardware and remain fragile if communication collapses. Book One establishes that vulnerability before Mars appears through a window, making the social system as important as the mechanical one.

Between fiction and real Mars-mission constraints

At the scale of Book 1, the question becomes concrete: The series uses concrete constraints (travel time, crew training, redundancy, isolation, life-support systems, local resources and delayed communication)to make the human consequences of a Mars mission tangible. It does not claim to reproduce the exact mission that will eventually occur. It asks what such an undertaking would demand from the people, institutions and technologies involved.

• NASA : Moon to Mars Architecture
• NASA : MOXIE experiment on Mars
• SpaceX : Starship
• Mars Society : Mars Direct concept

Book One focuses on everything that must happen before launch: who should be selected, how ordinary human beings could be prepared for a mission of rupture, and how a group of candidates becomes a crew able to leave Earth without a simple promise of return.

For the research context behind these issues, see radiation, shielding and shelter strategies

Real constraints give the story another purpose: distinguishing spectacular travel from durable presence. Medicine, radiation, delayed communication, skill redundancy, reserves and local decision-making are not decorative references. They change what characters can safely do and explain why preparation matters as much as the spacecraft. The narrative remains fiction, but it tries to preserve a chain of consequences in which technical limits produce human choices rather than disappearing whenever the plot needs an easy solution.

Learning to decide far from terrestrial rescue

The first novel in David Salvan’s realistic Mars quadrilogy: international selection, demanding training, human relationships and the irreversible departure of the first settlers.

• readers of science fiction and anticipation looking for a credible progression toward Mars
• spaceflight enthusiasts interested in autonomous bases and crewed exploration
• readers drawn to selection, crew psychology and the birth of an isolated community
• those who enjoy sagas in which technical challenges remain inseparable from human relationships

Distance changes the meaning of authority. A delayed answer from Earth may arrive after the local team has already had to act, which makes judgement, documentation and trust as important as hardware. The novel uses this constraint to connect technical preparation with a harder question: whether a crew trained under terrestrial supervision can become capable of deciding responsibly when supervision is no longer immediate.

That shift does not happen at the instant of launch. It is prepared through simulations, shared procedures and the habit of explaining decisions to one another. The first volume therefore treats autonomy as a competence that must be learned before it becomes a necessity.

This opening volume also prepares everything that follows. Habits developed during selection and training later become working practices, then collective rules and eventually political reflexes. The way a crew learns to decide under constraint already anticipates how a Martian community may one day debate responsibility, autonomy and sovereignty. Book One is therefore more than a prelude: it is the human matrix from which the later city and its institutions can plausibly emerge.