A few months ago, the editors at Quillette asked me to review Robert Zubrin’s newest book “The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet and Why We Must.” As a fan of Zubrin’s work, I wasn’t surprised that I enjoyed the book. But I was pleased and amused to find echoes of work I had done as far back as high school in the 1970s, applying the Turner thesis to space settlement. (We called it “space colonization” back then.)
https://quillette.com/2024/09/03/life-on-mars-space-elon-musk-starship/
The review has been up on Quillette for a few months now, and they’ve given me permission to reproduce it here on my own blog. (The version below is my original; the version they posted was lightly edited, but didn’t change anything substantial.) I also recorded an audio version if you’d rather listen to it; you can click on the link below, or find it on Spotify.
https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=QLTUL3889171822
A review of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin, 280 pages, Diversion Books (May 2024).
This is a remarkable book. It’s notionally about colonizing Mars… with plenty of math, diagrams, and technical disquisitions about how that will be accomplished. But it’s mostly a book about mankind… our history, our capabilities, and our future potential.
Robert Zubrin is well known in space circles. An earlier book, The Case for Mars (1996), is based on his work surrounding Mars settlement dating back into the late 1980s. He has been the leading proponent of a “Mars Direct” architecture, one of the first proposals for drastically reducing the cost of a Mars mission by extracting propellant from the Martian atmosphere and building shelters from Martian rock and regolith.
Now, with The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024), Zubrin has consolidated three decades of additional research, as well as substantial new discoveries about Mars made by 21st century orbiters, landers, and rovers. He adapted the first chapter of the book in these pages in March 2024 <https://quillette.com/2024/03/19/what-can-we-create-on-mars-robert-zubrin/>.
Zubrin starts from a position of manifest destiny: we should send humans to Mars, in quantities sufficient to establish multiple 10,000-person cities, in order to take the next step in human development.
There are likely to be many noble experiments on Mars. Some will fail, but others will succeed, leading their cities to grow, prosper, invent, create, and, by example, set a new standard for the further progress of humanity everywhere.
This is not a universally held belief.
Millions of people would state that “we have enough problems here at home,” and we shouldn’t be expending time and treasure on exploring or settling Mars. An extreme faction would state that we shouldn’t interfere with Mars at all, leaving it in pristine desolation, without exporting our pollution, factionalism, and wars to other worlds. Zubrin rejects these positions, stating “To claim that humans do not have the right to alter Mars because has the right to be unaltered is as nutty as claiming that Michelangelo was committing criminal mutilation of marble blocks by chiseling them into statues.” He follows with strong arguments as to why permanent Martian settlements will benefit all of mankind, even those individuals who never set foot outside their home province on Earth.
But even among space enthusiasts, the settlement of Mars is not universally accepted as a goal. Since Apollo, U.S. space policy has been roughly divided among three camps, which can be described as O’Neillians, von Braunians, and Saganites. Zubrin is marking out a fourth way.
During the heyday of the Apollo moon landings, everyone expected NASA’s next big step to be to Mars. In 1969, Gerard K. O’Neill asked his Princeton students “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?” Upon pursuing variations of this question with a decade of students, he concluded the answer was “No.”
In O’Neill’s vision, humanity should expand beyond Earth, but in large self-sufficient habitats (then called “space colonies” before the word “colonization” became toxic) orbiting in free space. Exploitation of solar system resources would provide a profit motive, and the government would be just one, very large, customer of private sector aerospace technologies. Although most O’Neillians support the idea of mining the Moon for resources, they tend to be more focused on asteroids and comets. Their attitude towards Mars can be summed up by space venture capitalist Michael Mealling: “Why would I go to so much effort climbing out of Earth’s gravity well, just to climb down another one on Mars?” There’s a strong O’Neillian camp in space development today, most notably led by Jeff Bezos and his aerospace company, Blue Origin.
Others, mostly tempered in the Cold War, see space as a continuation of politics by other means. These are the von Braunians—believing that spectacular space missions are a way of demonstrating national superiority, much as Apollo showed the world how a free market could outperform the Soviet centrally-planned economy. (Of course, in the process, Apollo created an American centrally-planned economy, which derailed space development for forty years. Think for a moment why we have a national “space program,” but did not have an “aviation program” or “automobile program.”) Traditional aerospace and defense primes like Boeing and Lockheed Martin fall into this category. Bluntly, they’d be happy with “flags and footprints” missions that have no lasting economic impact, as long as the missions are paid for by the taxpayers.
Yet a third group of space enthusiasts, honoring the vision of Carl Sagan and others, believe in sending robotic probes everywhere in the solar system (and perhaps beyond), but without sending people. This faction believes that the cost and risk of human missions are too high, and that we can collect ample scientific knowledge at a substantial discount without risking the lives of human explorers. This camp is best expressed by the Planetary Society and its fellow travelers. They point with pride to the amazing discoveries of the NASA Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, and Perseverance.) They fail to note that these same discoveries could have been made in an afternoon by one geologist, on foot, with a rock hammer and a magnifying glass.
I suspect Zubrin would reject the Saganites and the von Braunians outright. He would probably make common cause with the O’Neillians, and I suspect would welcome the chance to let the free market thrash out the potential advantages and disadvantages of Mars cities versus orbiting habitats. But Zubrin and Elon Musk are the leading exponents of a fourth camp, which I will call the “New Martians.” And a substantial portion of his new book relies upon SpaceX’s Starship architecture for transportation to Mars, upon Mars, and beyond Mars.
Starship is revolutionary. NASA’s space shuttle, albeit a technological triumph, never lived up to its economic objectives. Each launch cost approximately $1 billion. When operational, Starship will cost $5 million per flight, for five times the payload… an overall 1000x improvement in cost per kilogram to orbit. And since Musk is already setting the groundwork for mass production, a fleet of Starships will have the capability to take millions of tons of cargo—and thousands of settlers—to Mars.
Zubrin goes through a lot of math, which the less-technical reader can easily skip. But even if you don’t know the difference between Delta-V and Delta House, the numbers are compelling. The fare for a one-way trip for one person and his or her basic equipment will be about $300,000. Which is not a trivial amount of money, but is well within the ability of millions of people to liquidate and/or borrow. And, as he points out, in constant dollars, this is comparable to the price of a berth on a ship from Europe to the New World in the 17th century. People found a way to fill those berths. They’ll find a way to fill the berths on a Mars colonial transport.
At this point, the reader begins to understand Zubrin’s vision (which he shares with Elon Musk). These will not be “NASA missions” (although NASA may purchase tickets for some of its personnel). In the words of aerospace engineer and author Rand Simberg, “It’s not NASA’s job to go to Mars. It’s NASA’s job to enable the National Geographic Society to go to Mars.” You can expand that to include large companies, entrepreneurial startups, space agencies from smaller nations, church groups—SpaceX and its eventual competitors will carry anyone who can pay the fare. This enforces a completely different set of requirements, metrics, and success criteria on a Zubrinesque Mars settlement.
And the key word is “settlement.” NASA is currently planning for the Artemis missions to return to the Moon. (Officially, NASA has no plans for Mars missions at this time.) Even though the claim is “this time to stay,” the plans for long-term habitation of the Moon are timid, with astronauts confined to landers and, eventually, surface habitats scarcely bigger than landers. The overall impression is of Antarctic outposts, crewed by handfuls of stalwart astronauts with decades of training.
Zubrin is proposing cities on Mars: tens of thousands of people with all the living quarters, industrial areas, and life support necessary to thrive in an environment vastly harsher than Antarctica. And children. Lots and lots of children. No matter what Elton John sang, Mars will be the kind of place to raise your kids.
He draws an explicit analogy to the English and French settlements of the New World. England sent families, or women who wanted to raise families. France built trading outposts, staffed entirely by men. By the 1750s, even though France’s population was four times the size of England’s, English colonists outnumbered the French by 40:1 (2 million to 50,000). Zubrin expects a similar dynamic on Mars. The cities that attract and support the most families will economically win out against technocratic settlements who see children as a bother underfoot. Mars needs women—and children—if it is to thrive.
He does the math to demonstrate that lifting from Earth all the infrastructure needed to support thousands of people on Mars is economically unattractive. Only those devices which require a deep industrial base will be shipped from Earth. To use an analogy from the American frontier, you didn’t ship lumber to San Francisco. You shipped axes and saw blades, which were used to cut down local trees and make them into lumber.
Whatever can be made on Mars, will be made on Mars. From building materials, to growing crops, to industrial machinery, Mars settlements will resemble busy workshops and factories more than scientific outposts. The New Martians are going to be busy surviving and thriving. They’ll deliver plenty of scientific discoveries… but discoveries driven by the need to constantly build infrastructure for themselves and their children.
Chronic labor shortages will lead to different social norms. Children will get much of their education “on the job,” helping their parents. And elders who would be retired on Earth will continue working as long as they are able, passing on knowledge to younger generations. It will be a much harsher world. Zubrin explicitly draws analogies between the new world on Mars and the New World of the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. A shared sense of culture and of building a shared future will be critical to avoid social breakdown.
As noted in the quote above, Zubrin expects many “noble experiments” on Mars… not a single planetary-wide government, but a messy patchwork of cities, smaller settlements, industrial parks, and possibly individual homesteaders. While not promoting a laissez faire lack of regulation, he clearly believes that competition fosters creativity, innovation, and efficiencies that can’t be met by centralized planning. It will be interesting to see how this plays out if New Martian cities populated from Western democracies are sharing the planet with more authoritarian outposts from China.
Note that, at this point, Zubrin departs from his fellow New Martian, Elon Musk. Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants to build a million-person Mars city in the next ten years. Zubrin dismisses this goal, even if you make allowance for “Elon time” on schedules. He’d much rather see multiple 50,000 person cities over the next fifty years, with the ability of each one to compete with all the others for raw materials, people, and capital investment.
But what are all these people going to do?
Government-funded settlements will look like Antarctic outposts: small, cramped, and completely dependent on Earth for survival. Fulfilling the vision of true cities on Mars will require unlocking vast sums of private investment capital. What does Mars have that’s worth investment by private-sector entities that want to make a profit? Mars has rocks. Earth has rocks. Mars has (frozen) water. Earth has water. Mars has carbon dioxide. Earth has, arguably, too much carbon dioxide. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which extracting raw materials from the Martian surface for export to Earth makes any sort of economic sense.
No, those raw materials need to be transformed into usable resources. Zubrin makes a case that:
There are really no such things as ‘natural resources.’ There are only natural raw materials. It is human creativity that transforms raw materials through technological innovations. On Earth, land was not a resource until people invented agriculture. Oil was not a resource until people invented petroleum drilling and refining and machines that could run on the products. Aluminum was not a resource until the late nineteenth century, when technologies were invented to extract the metal from aluminum oxide. Until then, it was just dirt.
Mars has an entire planet full of raw materials. (And acts as a gateway to even larger stockpiles in the asteroid belt; see below.) Those raw materials will be transformed into useful resources by human ingenuity. And those resources will be used to solve problems, both for the New Martians and for humans everywhere.
The New Martians are going to invent. Zubrin goes through an entire panoply of sectors where focused teams with a compelling need could make substantial advances—especially if liberated from stultifying bureaucracies back home. From fusion power to biotechnology to industrial automation to robotics—Mars will be perennially short of power and labor for decades. Inventions to make more power available and to leverage that so larger enterprises can be managed by fewer people… those inventions will be critical to the survival and growth of New Martian cities. But those inventions will be equally applicable to problems on Earth. So the first exports from Mars will not be metals or volatile gases or Martian-made devices. The first exports will be patents. The New Martian cities will become intellectual property powerhouses. And, as such, they’ll attract investment from wealthy investors, just as Columbus attracted investment from the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, and just as Silicon Valley attracted investment from wealthy individuals, pension funds, and venture capital firms.
And, interestingly, the New Martians won’t just export back to Earth. Given their location and lower gravity, they will also import and export goods and services to the asteroid belt—a sprawling collection of rocks between Mars and Jupiter with trillions of dollars of metals, volatile gases, and other valuable materials. The implacable laws of orbital mechanics dictate that an orbitally-refueled SpaceX Starship can travel from Earth to Mars… or from Mars to the asteroid belt. (And back.) But a Starship cannot make it from Earth to the asteroid belt without a refueling stop. That will be at Mars. Therefore, Mars will act the role of Seattle in the Yukon Gold Rush. Everyone will fuel there. Everyone will refit there. Everyone will sell their extracted raw materials there. And everyone will use the cities to let off steam, after years trapped in asteroid mining vessels.
Zubrin even goes so far as to forecast an interplanetary version of the “triangle trade” which built the economy of New England, with Earth supplying high-tech manufactured goods to Mars, Mars supplying low-tech goods and food staples to the asteroid belt, and the asteroids sending metals to Earth.
Mars could become the economic hub of the Solar System.
This sounds like science fiction. In fact, it sounds like the Solar System described in “The Expanse”—an award-winning set of novels that was made into a highly-acclaimed popular television series. It also has echoes of “For All Mankind,” another popular television series that includes the earliest stages of Mars settlement and asteroid mining. Zubrin’s strength is taking concepts that sound like science fiction, then analyzing the technological, economic, and political underpinnings that would be required to make them reality.
I have some quibbles with Zubrin’s vision. First off, he bases a lot of his economic projections on the value of Martian real estate becoming an attractive financial asset. But, except for a passing comment in the Epilogue, he ignores the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. This treaty, with 122 signatories, forbids any nation from claiming an extraterrestrial object as its sovereign territory. So the United States cannot simply annex part of Mars (or the Moon) as the 51st state and extend American rule of law to that territory.
This has been a subject of academic debate for years but, now that extraction of extraterrestrial resources is on the near horizon, it has become much less theoretical. The U.S. and China have (publicly) diametrically opposite interpretations of the treaty, with complex consequences. The U.S., with the Artemis Accords (43 signatory nations and counting) is attempting to build a coalition of nations willing to take steps towards recognizing property rights on extraterrestrial bodies. But it’s early days yet, and the consensus is fragile. It’s doubtful that the billions of dollars necessary to build a new Silicon Valley on Mars will be available until the legal framework of land ownership is nailed down.
Second, Zubrin makes a strong case that, in the long run, thriving successful cities on Mars will necessarily be populated mostly by native-born New Martians, not emigrants from Earth. However, we have absolutely no idea if this is possible. Humans have evolved for millions of years in Earth’s gravitational field. We have no data on how humans will thrive and reproduce in lower gravity. At the furthest limit—zero gravity—the data is discouraging. Robert Heinlein was wrong, and zero G is unhealthy for humans. From muscular atrophy to loss of bone density, to glaucoma, to immune systems disorders, astronauts who have stayed for 6 to 12 months on the International Space Station have experienced various levels of health problems, from annoying to potentially debilitating.
Many physiologists believe that the ? Earth gravity on Mars should be sufficient to stave off these disorders and enable successful conception, gestation, and birth. But we don’t know. Until we have vastly more data from ?-G centrifuges in Earth orbit, it’s irresponsible to hypothesize about tens of thousands of humans being safely born on Mars.
Lastly, Zubrin’s view of colonization and settlement is very U.S.-centric. There have been other models in recent human history. Australia was settled by British criminals. Although it has done well, the Australian frontier evolved very differently than the American frontier. Brazil was colonized—not settled—by the younger scions of Portuguese upper classes, who came to extract as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible, and had no intention of staying and building families. There are other examples. The steps outlined by Zubrin are necessary but not sufficient to achieve his vision of a thriving and self-sufficient Mars.
But these problems can be solved, whether through negotiating new treaties, or through better understanding of human physiology. Fundamentally, there is an entire new world there for the taking, with a land area equal to Earth’s. In the long term (centuries, not millennia), Zubrin explores how Mars could be terraformed into a planet where humans could walk on the surface without spacesuits… and someday, without even breathing masks. Humanity won’t be held back by treaties, or by technical obstacles. Expansion is what humans do.
Zubrin quotes approvingly from the Turner thesis (on which, coincidentally, I wrote my senior thesis in 1979):
“To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893
This is the foundation for Zubrin’s concluding argument. Settling Mars isn’t just about making humanity a multi-planetary species. Settling Mars is about improving the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for everyone on Earth.
John F. Kennedy correctly labeled space as “The New Frontier,” but we haven’t been treating it as a frontier. We’ve been treating it as scientific curiosity, occasionally visited by super-qualified astronauts selected for physical, mental, and emotional excellence. That’s not how a frontier works. Crossing the Atlantic to settle in the New World attracted people who were dissatisfied with their role in Europe. “People who did not ‘fit in’ with the Old World’ could discover and demonstrate that, far from being worthless, they were invaluable in the New.”
Similarly, the American West was settled by malcontents, restless souls, and people who felt trapped by the crowds and smokestacks of East Coast cities. “Go West, young man” was not just an exhortation by Horace Greeley. It was the touchstone of an age, when ambitious young men (and, eventually, women) could move to an unpopulated desolation and carve out a homestead… or a fortune.
(Of course, America was not actually “unpopulated,” and the treatment of native Americans was deplorable. Luckily, abuse of native populations is one problem we won’t have anywhere in the Solar System.)
Society has changed, but human nature has not. Having a relief valve for the built-up pressures of modern industrial civilization is needed more than ever. In the process, the settlers will be required to improvise, adapt, and invent new technologies to overcome the challenges of their new frontier. As Zubrin claims, “without the opening of a new frontier on Mars, continued Western civilization faces the risk of technological stagnation.”
We’ve spent fifty years taking small steps into orbit and onto Earth’s Moon. Settling Mars will truly be “one giant leap for Mankind.” It will unlock vast new resources, bringing the possibility of wealth and well-being to everyone on Earth. Zubrin reframes the history of the 20th century as “the real lesson of the last century’s genocides is this: We are not endangered by a lack of resources. We are endangered by those who believe there is a shortage of resources. We are not threatened by the existence of too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.” Rather than squabbling on Earth’s surface, with wars for oil, water, or other finite resources, we can lift our eyes to the endless wealth of the Solar System. Rather than the endless jostling with our neighbors for lebensraum, every nation or group can have as much living room as they desire.
The social, economic, and political problems of 16th century Europe could not be solved within the boundaries of Europe. Solutions involved zooming out, and reorganizing society within a larger frame that included a New World. The same is true today. Earth’s problems are solvable, but they are not solvable solely on Earth. Zubrin has done a masterful job of summarizing our challenges, our capabilities, and our future potential. For humanity to thrive, we need to build a new world on Mars.
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Stephen Fleming is an experienced investor in space startups, and the founder of the Arizona Space Business Roundtable. He recently retired from the University of Arizona after a long career at Georgia Tech and in the private sector. He maintains an aerospace and entrepreneurship consulting practice at www.boostphase.com, and spends way too much time on Twitter/X at @stephenfleming.
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