Robert Zubrin

Chapter 1 · 1952 – 1983 A Brooklyn Boy Watching the Moon

Robert Zubrin was born on April 9, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York City. His father was descended from Russian Jewish immigrants. He was seventeen when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in July 1969.

The Promise of 1969

Thirty-four years later, before a U.S. Senate committee, he would recall what that era promised. If anyone had told him at seventeen that humans would no longer go beyond low Earth orbit, that they would be established neither on the Moon nor on Mars, he would not have believed it. In 1969, he stressed, the Space Task Group convened for President Nixon foresaw sending humans to Mars by 1981. In his view, NASA could have done it if it had been allowed to continue. His whole career would be an answer to that broken promise.

An Inventive Mind

At twenty, in 1972, he was awarded his first patent: a chess game for three players. In 1974 he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Rochester, in New York State. He did not become an engineer right away: for seven years he taught science.

That detour mattered. All his life Robert Zubrin would love to explain: reducing a complicated problem to a few simple ideas, finding an image everyone understands. Before the senators, he would compare NASA’s way of working to two young couples wanting to build their house; in his technical papers, he would compare a poorly designed Mars mission to a Christmas vacation in Hawaii with nine days spent transferring around airports and half a day at the beach.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Robert Zubrin” (birth on April 9, 1952 in Brooklyn, ancestry, 1972 patent for three-player chess, Rochester degree in 1974, seven years of teaching; tertiary source); hearing “The Future of NASA,” U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, October 29, 2003, S. Hrg. 108-1012 (seventeen in 1969, thirty-four years later, the Space Task Group and Mars by 1981, the two couples); R. Zubrin and D. Baker, “Humans to Mars in 1999,” NASA, 1991 (the Hawaii vacation). The sentence “His whole career would be an answer…” and the paragraph on his love of explaining are the author’s reading, based on the texts cited.

Chapter 2 · 1983 – 1990 Engineer of Distant Voyages

In the early 1980s Robert Zubrin went back to school at the University of Washington in Seattle. He earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering in 1984, then a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics in 1986. His doctorate in nuclear engineering would follow in 1992.

At Martin Marietta

He joined Martin Marietta, a major American aerospace manufacturer. There he became a senior engineer, one of the leaders in developing advanced concepts for interplanetary missions. In 2003 he would cite fifteen years of aerospace industry experience.

A Sail Pushed by the Sun’s Wind

In April 1990, with Dana Andrews of Boeing, he presented at a NASA symposium called “Vision-21” a striking idea: the magnetic sail. A large superconducting loop carrying a current would create around a spacecraft a magnetic field able to catch the solar wind, the stream of particles flowing out from the Sun, and draw thrust from it. Their study considered an average thrust of 250 newtons at the Earth’s distance from the Sun, and even, at speeds close to that of light, a way to brake an interstellar craft.

Refueling on Site

At the same symposium he presented another idea, which foreshadowed everything he would later do for Mars: a nuclear rocket that would use as propellant a substance found on site, on the world being visited. A reactor would heat carbon dioxide, water, methane or nitrogen taken locally to form a propulsive jet. On Mars, such a vehicle could refuel each time it landed, giving explorers great mobility. In 1991 he detailed a version for Mars, called NIMF, for “Nuclear rocket using Indigenous Martian Fuel.”

The key idea is there: not to carry everything from Earth, but to use the resources of the world you are going to. Today this principle is called in-situ resource utilization.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Robert Zubrin” (master’s degrees of 1984 and 1986, 1992 doctorate, University of Washington, senior engineer at Martin Marietta in charge of advanced interplanetary concepts; tertiary source); Senate hearing of October 29, 2003 (fifteen years of experience); NASA Technical Reports Server: D. G. Andrews (Boeing) and R. M. Zubrin (Martin Marietta), “Use of magnetic sails for advanced exploration missions,” Vision-21, April 1990; R. M. Zubrin, “Nuclear thermal rockets using indigenous extraterrestrial propellants,” Vision-21, April 1990; R. Zubrin, “Nuclear rocket using indigenous Martian fuel NIMF,” 1991.

Chapter 3 · 1989 – 1990 The 90-Day Report

On July 20, 1989, for the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11, President George H. W. Bush announced on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum a long-term project: a space station, a return to the Moon “to stay,” then the sending of astronauts to Mars. NASA had to say how.

A Colossal Plan

In November 1989 NASA delivered its study, remembered as the “90-Day Report.” It called for building large spacecraft in orbit, using the space station, to go to the Moon and then to Mars. The cost was staggering: about $400 billion according to Robert Zubrin, about $450 billion over twenty to thirty years according to other sources. Congress refused. Within a year, all funding requests had been denied.

For Robert Zubrin, the error was one of method. He would describe it in 2003 before the Senate: instead of designing the simplest possible mission, a bureaucracy is tempted to use a Mars project as a kind of Christmas tree on which to hang various desired technology programs as ornaments. The result was a “hopelessly bloated and overpriced plan.” He himself speaks of “Battlestar Galactica” spaceships, after the giant ship of a science fiction television series: huge vehicles assembled in orbit, which are not needed.

Management’s Green Light

At Martin Marietta, he relates, a few engineers convinced management that a more practical plan had to be developed, or there would be no program at all. Management gave them a green light. With his colleague David Baker, Robert Zubrin worked out an extremely stripped-down strategy. It comes down to three ideas that recur in all his writing: travel light, use local resources, live off the land.

In 1990 they presented their plan at several NASA centers. They called it Mars Direct.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Space Exploration Initiative” and “Mars Direct” (speech of July 20, 1989, about $450 billion over twenty to thirty years, funding requests denied, David Baker; tertiary source); NASA SP-6107, 1997, references (“Report of the 90-Day Study,” November 1989); Senate hearing of October 29, 2003 (thirty-year plan, about $400 billion, Congress’s refusal, the Martin team, the green light, the 1990 presentation, the Christmas tree and the “hopelessly bloated and overpriced plan,” the “gigantic Battlestar Galactica spaceship”); R. Zubrin, written statement to the Senate, 2003 (“travel light and live off the land”).

Chapter 4 · 1990 – 1991 Mars Direct

“Can the United States send humans to Mars during the present decade? Absolutely.” That is how Robert Zubrin and David Baker opened their presentation at a NASA symposium, published in May 1991 under the title “Humans to Mars in 1999.” Their plan fits in a few pages.

First, the Ride Home

In December 1996 a single heavy-lift launcher derived from the Space Shuttle lifts off from Cape Canaveral with a forty-ton unmanned payload. Eight months later it aerobrakes into orbit around Mars and lands. It carries the vehicle that will later bring the crew back to Earth, with its tanks empty; 5.8 tons of liquid hydrogen; a small 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor mounted on a truck; compressors, a small automated chemical plant and a few robots.

The truck moves the reactor a few hundred meters away. The compressors draw in the Martian atmosphere, 95 percent carbon dioxide. With a catalyst, this gas reacts with the hydrogen brought from Earth and in a few days produces methane and water. The water is then split into oxygen and hydrogen; the oxygen is stored, the hydrogen reused. Oxygen is also taken directly from carbon dioxide. In a year the plant produces about 107 tons of propellant, methane and oxygen, enough to bring the crew home. “This may sound somewhat involved,” they write, “but actually the chemical processes employed are 19th century technology.”

Then, the Crew

If propellant production has succeeded, two more launchers leave in January 1999. One carries a second plant, identical to the first. The other carries the crew: four people in a habitat that looks, they say, “somewhat like a giant hockey puck,” 27.5 feet across and 16 feet tall, with a living deck of some 594 square feet. The trip takes six months. To avoid the ill effects of weightlessness, the habitat stays connected by a tether about 1,500 yards long to the rocket stage that launched it, and the assembly spins at one revolution per minute: the crew thus gets a gravity equal to that of Mars, three eighths of Earth’s.

The crew lands near the already fueled return vehicle. Robots have surveyed the site and laid out radar beacons. If the landing misses its target, three fallback options are built in: a pressurized rover with a one-way range of 600 miles to drive to the return rocket; the second plant, following a few days behind, can be directed to land near them; and finally, enough supplies to wait for a relief expedition two years later.

Five Hundred Days on Mars

Conventional plans, they note, leave a mothership in orbit and allow only a short stay on the surface. It is like planning a Christmas vacation in Hawaii with nine days of transferring around airports and half a day at the beach. With Mars Direct, the crew spends five hundred days on Mars and only twelve to sixteen months in interplanetary cruise, on the most efficient trajectories. Protected by the Martian atmosphere and some sandbags on the habitat, they receive a total dose of about 50 rem, which raises by about 1.5 percent the probability of contracting cancer later in life: a serious risk, but an acceptable one in their view.

During their stay the crew can travel thousands of miles in a vehicle powered by part of the propellant, search for traces of past or present life and, above all, for water ice, which would make later missions independent of Earth. An inflatable greenhouse can even be set up. On departure the habitat is left behind. Every two years a new mission adds a base, some 500 miles from the previous one.

Source: R. Zubrin and D. Baker (Martin Marietta Astronautics), “Humans to Mars in 1999,” Space Transportation Propulsion Technology Symposium, vol. 3, NASA, May 1991 (NTRS 19910018923): all the content of the chapter, including the quotations “Absolutely,” “somewhat like a giant hockey puck” and “19th century technology.” The French edition converts the paper’s imperial measurements into metric units.

Chapter 5 · 1990 – 1997 NASA Takes Up the Idea

Presented at NASA centers from 1990 on, Mars Direct immediately stirred debate. Robert Zubrin told what followed in 2003, answering a senator’s questions.

Supporters and Opponents

Many NASA engineers supported the plan; others opposed it, especially those in the space station program: Mars Direct did not use the station, and they saw it as a threat to their project. The idea got around nonetheless. Around 1991 Robert Zubrin was invited to brief Michael Griffin, the new associate administrator for exploration, who became a supporter and briefed Daniel Goldin, NASA Administrator from April 1992 (“Golden” in the transcript), who was supportive in vaguer terms. Zubrin was sent back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, with instructions for everyone to listen.

The “Semi-Direct” Plan

Johnson’s human exploration team, which included Mike Duke, Dave Weaver and John Connolly, adopted the principles of Mars Direct: no on-orbit assembly, direct launch to Mars, use of Martian resources from the very first mission, long stays on the surface from the very first trip. But they wanted to redo the numbers themselves. Their version was bigger: six astronauts instead of four, larger vehicles, three heavy-lift launches per mission instead of two. Zubrin called it the “Semi-Direct” plan. The same team that had costed the 90-day plan at $400 billion costed its version at $55 billion. Mars Direct itself was estimated, according to Zubrin, at around $30 billion for development, then $2 to $3 billion per mission.

The 1997 Reference Mission

This study became NASA’s “Design Reference Mission.” The document published in 1997 states that its architecture “builds on previous work, principally on the work of the Synthesis Group (1991) and Zubrin’s (1991) concepts for the use of propellants derived from the martian atmosphere.” It cites the Mars Direct paper presented in January 1991 in Reno at the meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The reference mission nonetheless differs on important points: for instance, it uses nuclear rocket engines to send the crew toward Mars.

But, according to Zubrin, by the time the study was ready, the new administration was not favorable to human Mars exploration, and the plan was put on the back shelf.

Minerva and a Sample Return

The idea spread beyond NASA. In 1992 a study titled “Project Minerva,” listed by NASA, described a low-cost human mission based on in-situ propellant production, “following the scenario originally proposed by R. Zubrin of Martin Marietta.” In 1995, under a Lockheed Martin affiliation, Zubrin co-authored with Steve Price a study listed by NASA: using the same chemistry for a low-cost robotic Mars sample return mission, making the return fuel on Mars.

Sources: Senate hearing of October 29, 2003, answers to Senator Brownback (presentation at the centers in 1990, supporters and opponents, the station, M. Griffin around 1991, D. Goldin, Johnson, M. Duke, D. Weaver, J. Connolly, the principles adopted, six astronauts and three launches, “Semi-Direct,” $400 and $55 billion, $30 billion and $2 to $3 billion, the new administration); English-language Wikipedia, “Mars Direct” (D. Goldin Administrator on April 1, 1992; tertiary source); NASA, Human Exploration of Mars: The Reference Mission of the NASA Mars Exploration Study Team, NASA SP-6107, 1997 (quotation, reference to AIAA paper 91-0326 from Reno, January 7-10, 1991, NERVA engines); NASA Technical Reports Server, “Project Minerva,” 1992, and R. Zubrin and S. Price (Lockheed Martin), “Mars Sample Return mission utilizing in-situ propellant production,” March 31, 1995. The name of Carl Mandel, also cited by Zubrin, is omitted here for lack of detail on his role.

Chapter 6 · 1996 – 1998 From Engineer to Advocate

In 1996 Robert Zubrin published The Case for Mars, subtitled “The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.” It sets out Mars Direct for the general public and was a success.

His Own Companies

The same year he founded his own research and development company, Pioneer Astronautics, first called Pioneer Invention. It lived mainly on small research contracts, tackling a wide variety of space-related problems. He left Martin Marietta and also co-founded, with Mitchell Burnside Clapp, an engineer from the U.S. Air Force, a company called Pioneer Rocketplane, because large aerospace firms seemed to him uninterested in reducing launch costs. In 2003 he would state that Pioneer Astronautics had five NASA and military research contracts.

Disappointment

He also had experience as an activist, in leadership at the National Space Society, a space advocacy organization. But, according to Wikipedia, disappointed by governments’ lack of interest in Mars exploration, and buoyed by the success of his book, he decided to create an organization devoted entirely to the Red Planet.

The principle he defends would not change again: we can go to Mars with existing technology, at a reasonable cost, provided the goal is clearly set and the crews live off Martian resources. What is missing, he repeats, is neither money nor technology, but a clear goal.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Robert Zubrin” (The Case for Mars in 1996, Pioneer Astronautics founded in 1996, formerly Pioneer Invention, small research contracts, Pioneer Rocketplane with M. Burnside Clapp and his reasons, experience at the National Space Society, disappointment and the book’s success; tertiary source); Senate hearing of October 29, 2003 (five NASA and military contracts; “The problem is lack of focus”); Mars Society, “About” page. A French translation, Cap sur Mars, appears in the Internet Archive catalog (2004). The sentence “What is missing…” sums up his 2003 statement, in which he says NASA’s problem is not money but the lack of a goal.

Chapter 7 · August 1998 Boulder: The Birth of the Mars Society

In August 1998 about seven hundred people gathered at the University of Colorado in Boulder for the founding convention of a new organization: the Mars Society. Robert Zubrin was its founder, with others, and its president.

A Declaration

The attendees ratified a founding declaration. It opens with a simple sentence: “The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars.” It asserts that we are better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to travel to the Moon at the start of the space age, and that, given the will, the first crews could be there within a decade.

Then it lists the reasons to go. For the knowledge of Mars: the planet was once warm and wet, suitable for the origin of life, and finding fossils or microbes would show that life is not unique to Earth. For the knowledge of Earth: comparing planets helps us understand our own environment. For the challenge: civilizations, like people, thrive on challenge and decay without it. For the youth, whom such a program would draw to science. For the opportunity to build a new world. For our humanity, alone able to carry life to Mars. For the future, finally, since Mars has a surface area equal to all the continents of Earth combined and possesses all the elements needed for a civilization. The text closes with a pledge: its signers will not rest until it succeeds.

The First Project

At this convention the society officially chose its first project: building a research station simulating a Mars base on Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic. The idea had been proposed in April 1998 by Pascal Lee.

What the Society Wants

According to its own description, the Mars Society seeks to educate the public, the media and governments, to win international support for government-funded Mars research and exploration, and to encourage commercial ventures that can contribute. It advocates an approach based on Mars Direct or a similar plan: first send a cargo mission that sets up a propellant factory, then the crew. It holds an international convention every year.

Sources: Mars Society, “Founding Declaration” (ratification by seven hundred attendees in August 1998 at the University of Colorado in Boulder; content of the declaration, summarized, the text being under copyright; the opening sentence is quoted); Mars Society, “About” page (founded by Robert Zubrin and others in 1998, the society’s aims, Mars Direct, annual convention); English-language Wikipedia, “Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station” (Pascal Lee’s proposal in April 1998, choice at the founding convention; tertiary source). Pascal Lee has his own biography in this collection.

Chapter 8 · 1998 – 2002 Mars in the Arctic and in the Desert

To prepare to live on Mars, you have to train somewhere on Earth. The Mars Society decided to build its own simulation bases, in places that resemble Mars, to test how a team organizes itself, the suits, the tools and the design of a habitat.

On Devon Island

The first station, the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, stands on Devon Island, in Canada’s Nunavut territory, a polar desert. It overlooks the Haughton impact crater, twenty-three kilometers across, formed about thirty-nine million years ago. In 2003 Robert Zubrin would place it 900 miles from the North Pole. It was designed by architect Kurt Micheels and design engineer Wayne Cassalls, with Robert Zubrin and many members of the society, and completed in the summer of 2000.

The project cost $1.3 million, raised through sponsorships. An internet business, Flashline.com, donated $175,000 and was granted the right to give the station its name; the Kirsch Foundation and the Discovery Channel, which bought exclusive English-language TV rights for two years, were also among the backers. Robert Zubrin would tell this adventure in a book published in 2003, Mars on Earth: The Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic.

In the Utah Desert

The second station, the Mars Desert Research Station, was built in the early 2000s near Hanksville, Utah, on a plateau whose landscapes recall those of Mars. It began operating in 2002. It includes a two-story habitat with an airlock, a greenhouse, a solar observatory and a robotic observatory, an engineering pod and a science building.

Small crews succeed one another there. During their missions, members must wear a suit that simulates a spacesuit, with helmet, air pack and radio, whenever they go outside. They carry out research, often on the extreme microorganisms of the desert. The station has become, according to Wikipedia, the largest and longest-running Mars analog research facility.

Student Robots

The society also organizes, every year in Utah, the University Rover Challenge, a competition in which student teams build Mars rovers. Two other stations, in Europe and Australia, were planned; they never went beyond the planning stage.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station” (Devon Island, Nunavut, polar desert, Haughton crater of 23 km and 39 million years, completion in summer 2000, $1.3 million, Flashline.com and $175,000, Kirsch Foundation, Discovery Channel, K. Micheels and W. Cassalls, MDRS in 2002, European and Australian projects) and “Mars Desert Research Station” (Hanksville, early 2000s, buildings, suits, research, largest and longest-running station); “Mars Society” (University Rover Challenge); tertiary sources; Senate hearing of October 29, 2003 (900 miles from the North Pole); English-language Wikipedia, “Robert Zubrin” (bibliography: Mars on Earth, 2003).

Chapter 9 · October 29, 2003 Before the Senate

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. A few months later, on October 29, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, chaired by John McCain, held a hearing on the future of NASA. After the NASA Administrator and the chairman of the accident investigation board, four witnesses spoke. Among them was Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society.

Two Ways of Working

Why is NASA stuck in low Earth orbit? For Zubrin, the agency has had two modes of operation. From 1961 to 1973, the “Apollo mode”: political leaders set a goal, NASA develops a plan, vehicles are designed to implement it, they are built and the plan is flown. Since then, the “Shuttle mode”: technologies and hardware are developed according to the wishes of various technical communities, then justified by arguments that they might prove useful someday. The first is destination-driven; the second, he says, is constituency-driven.

To make himself understood, he tells the story of two young couples who want to build their own house. The first decides what kind of house it wants, hires an architect to design it and acquires the materials. The second buys each month whatever house parts its neighbors offer, piles them in the back yard, and, when relatives ask about all this junk, hires an architect to design a house that uses every piece. That house will never be built, but every purchase will have found its excuse.

“Mars Is Where the Future Is”

The problem, he asserts, is not money: NASA’s average budget from 1961 to 1973, in 2003 dollars, was about $17 billion a year, barely more than in 2003. The problem is the lack of a goal. And that goal should be Mars, in ten years, not fifty. “Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is and Mars is where the future is.” He describes Mars Direct in an updated version: a first departure in 2009, the crew in 2011, a year and a half on the surface, one more base with each trip. He urges Congress not to fund the small space plane then under consideration, estimated at $17 billion, but to pay for two competing six-month studies, at $30 million each, for a plan to send humans to Mars within ten years.

Questions and Answers

Chairman McCain asks him about China’s first crewed launch, which had just taken place. Zubrin sees it as a useful wake-up call for the United States. McCain also mentions the probe due to land soon near one of the poles of Mars to look for water. Zubrin answers that water will certainly be found there, and that the real question is that of past life: if it appeared on Mars, it might survive underground, and life would then be a general phenomenon in the universe.

Senator Sam Brownback remarks that he seems angry. Zubrin agrees one could put it that way. He recalls that he was seventeen in 1969, that NASA then planned humans on Mars by 1981, and that the first children born on Mars should, in his view, be entering school right about now. He compares the space program to a Prince Henry the Navigator who, instead of sending his ships farther and farther down the coast of Africa, had them sit a hundred miles out to sea to watch the health effects on the sailors. He argues for artificial gravity rather than years of studying the effects of weightlessness.

Source: U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, The Future of NASA, hearing of October 29, 2003, S. Hrg. 108-1012 (list of witnesses, R. Zubrin’s oral and written statements, answers to Senators McCain and Brownback); all the content of the chapter comes from it, including the quotation “Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is and Mars is where the future is.” The date of the Columbia accident, Admiral Gehman’s chairmanship of the investigation board and China’s first crewed vehicle launched “a few weeks ago” are mentioned in the same hearing.

Chapter 10 · 2005 Why a Frontier

In 2005 NASA published the proceedings of a symposium on forty years of U.S. human spaceflight, under the title Looking Backward, Looking Forward. Robert Zubrin spoke after a speaker he calls “Dr. Tyson.” He announced that he would talk not about how to get into space, but about why we need to.

Turner’s Thesis

He started from a historian: Frederick Jackson Turner, who had argued in 1893, three years after the American census declared the western frontier closed, that the American character, its practical turn of mind, its energy, its individualism, its institutions, all owed everything to the existence of an open frontier. Turner wondered what would become of a free, innovating society without room to grow. For Zubrin, if a new frontier is needed, it can no longer be on Earth, where everything is now within convenient range of communication and transportation. It has to be in space.

Why Mars

Of all the places within reach, Mars is in his view by far the best prospect, because it has all the resources needed to support life and therefore, potentially, civilization; the Moon does not. Mars is far enough away to free its colonists from the intellectual and cultural domination of the old world, and rich enough to give birth to a new civilization.

He offers several arguments. Without a new frontier, he says, human diversity declines as communications and jet aircraft link the world together. Technology stagnates: the B-52 bomber, in service for half a century, is for him the emblem. On a frontier, labor is scarce, and that scarcity drives the invention of labor-saving machinery; on Mars, no commodity will be in shorter supply than human labor. Finally, without a frontier, closed-world ideologies such as Malthus’s theory, holding that limited resources doom humans to deadly competition for a fixed pot, come to the forefront. But, he replies, humans create their resources: “With every mouth comes a pair of hands and a brain.”

Bringing Mars to Life

He ends on an idea he has long championed: if a new branch of civilization establishes itself on Mars, grows, then transforms the planet and brings life to it, it will prove to everyone and for all time the precious and positive nature of the human species and every member of it.

This project of transforming Mars, “terraforming,” raises an ethical question he has often debated in public with his friend Chris McKay: should priority go to possible Martian bacteria, or to human settlement? Zubrin holds a moderately anthropocentric position, McKay a moderately biocentric one.

Sources: R. Zubrin, “Pushing Human Frontiers,” in Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Years of U.S. Human Spaceflight Symposium, NASA, 2005 (NTRS 20060021488): all the content of the first three parts, including the quotation “With every mouth comes a pair of hands and a brain”; English-language Wikipedia, “Robert Zubrin” (debates with Christopher McKay, “moderately anthropocentric” and “moderately biocentric” positions; tertiary source). The date of 1893 is deduced from the same text, which places Turner’s address three years after the census of 1890; the idea of bringing life to Mars already appears in the Mars Society’s founding declaration (1998). Chris McKay has his own biography in this collection.

Chapter 11 · 2009 – 2026 A Plan That Set a Pattern

Robert Zubrin never stopped championing Mars Direct. But over the years his ideas spread beyond the circle of his supporters.

Before the Augustine Commission

In 2009 the new U.S. administration set up a panel, known as the “Augustine Commission,” to review the future of the human spaceflight program. Robert Zubrin came to argue for a lean Mars program along the lines of Mars Direct. According to Wikipedia, the commission was indifferent to his testimony: its final report concluded that a human Mars mission would demand decades of investment and carry considerable risk.

Fuel Made on Site

His central idea, making the return fuel on Mars, has nonetheless made its way. As early as 1997, NASA’s reference mission said it built on his 1991 concepts. Today the Mars Society states that the “living-off-the-land” approach, with a cargo mission that first sets up a propellant factory, has been adopted by NASA and SpaceX as the primary method for beginning the human exploration and settlement of Mars. That claim is the society’s, which he heads; we report it as such.

The Companies

In 2008 he founded another company, Pioneer Energy, based in Lakewood, Colorado, which develops mobile systems for carbon-dioxide-based enhanced oil recovery and processes for making synthetic fuels. On July 13, 2020, Voyager Space Holdings announced its acquisition of Pioneer Astronautics. He is the author of over two hundred technical and non-technical papers and many books, some on subjects other than space, such as energy. He is a co-inventor on patents for a hybrid rocket/airplane and for an oxygen supply system.

Still the Mars Society

He still heads the Mars Society, whose current and former members have included, according to Wikipedia, Buzz Aldrin, Elon Musk and James Cameron. He has kept publishing on space and on Mars: in 2019 The Case for Space, in 2024 The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.

Sources: English-language Wikipedia, “Mars Society” (testimony before the Augustine Commission in 2009, the report’s conclusion, members; tertiary source) and “Robert Zubrin” (Pioneer Energy in 2008 in Lakewood, acquisition of Pioneer Astronautics on July 13, 2020, over two hundred papers, patents, bibliography; tertiary source); NASA SP-6107, 1997; Mars Society, “About” page (claim about NASA and SpaceX).