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Mars on Earth
Recounts the virtual missions of the Mars Society space pioneer team, who while waiting for new technological advances in the space program, replicated and simulated the real-life challenges of exploring Mars on the harshest terrains on Earth. Reprint.
368 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2004
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About the author
Robert Zubrin
41 books163 followersRobert M. Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer and author, best known for his advocacy of human exploration of Mars. He and his colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker, were the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal in a 1990 research paper intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 14, 2020
How will humans get to Mars? And what will it be like when they get there? In Robert Zubrin's Mars on Earth, the man who brought us a compelling answer to the first question with The Case For Mars answers the second question. In Mars on Earth, Zubrin tells the story of the Mars Society and its efforts to establish Mars analogs in the Canadian Arctic and the Utah desert.
After a section that brings uninformed readers up to date on Zubrin's Mars Direct plan and the history of the Mars Society, as well as the case for their being potential fossilized life on the Red Planet, he gets into the meat and potatoes. We get a first-person account of fundraising, site selection, and the building of what comes to be known as Flashline Station on Devon Island. It's Flashline that gets the lion share of attention, due to Zubrin's direct involvement there, though there's also a chapter focusing on the Utah equivalent, which has some intriguing stories to tell in its own right. These are the best portions of the book, though with rotation crews having similar experiences, they can start to blur after awhile.
As this is Zubrun's account, there is some attention paid to the politics of the Mars Society and Zubrin's dealings with Pascal Lee. There are some interesting portions here as readers get to see what it's like to run something like the Mars Society, in addition to featuring cameo appearances by the likes of James Cameron and Elon Musk. In the dealings with Lee, Zubrin, rather unwisely, gets involved with airing dirty laundry in public. It's something that, ultimately, doesn't do the book any major favors either. Indeed, it merely serves to bring the narrative to a halt in a couple of places and, presumably, let Zubrin get a bit of a dig in.
Which is a shame because, without that, Mars on Earth makes for intriguing reading as part of the story of how we'll eventually get humans to the red planet.
After a section that brings uninformed readers up to date on Zubrin's Mars Direct plan and the history of the Mars Society, as well as the case for their being potential fossilized life on the Red Planet, he gets into the meat and potatoes. We get a first-person account of fundraising, site selection, and the building of what comes to be known as Flashline Station on Devon Island. It's Flashline that gets the lion share of attention, due to Zubrin's direct involvement there, though there's also a chapter focusing on the Utah equivalent, which has some intriguing stories to tell in its own right. These are the best portions of the book, though with rotation crews having similar experiences, they can start to blur after awhile.
As this is Zubrun's account, there is some attention paid to the politics of the Mars Society and Zubrin's dealings with Pascal Lee. There are some interesting portions here as readers get to see what it's like to run something like the Mars Society, in addition to featuring cameo appearances by the likes of James Cameron and Elon Musk. In the dealings with Lee, Zubrin, rather unwisely, gets involved with airing dirty laundry in public. It's something that, ultimately, doesn't do the book any major favors either. Indeed, it merely serves to bring the narrative to a halt in a couple of places and, presumably, let Zubrin get a bit of a dig in.
Which is a shame because, without that, Mars on Earth makes for intriguing reading as part of the story of how we'll eventually get humans to the red planet.
August 22, 2009
All about the construction of MDRS and FMARS - both of which I have lived in! Unfortunately, it kind of drags on in parts. The Case For Mars was better.
July 11, 2014
Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society and today's leading public advocate of Mars exploration, put together a project to study ways men and women might someday work on Mars. Mars on Earth is a book chronicling the beginning years of that project.
The mission of the project is for small groups of scientists to live and work in a cold, remote and dry place on earth--a Mars analog environment--and learn what it takes to succeed there.
Zubrin takes us through the genesis of the Mars Society project--it was apparently adopted as a sister project of an already-existing NASA project on Devon Island in the remote, northern Canadian wilderness. He describes the process of funding the project and the travails of building their first station, the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Friction develops between Zubrin and the NASA staff, tempers flare, and Zubrin finally breaks ties with the NASA project. The Mars Society project continues independently, not far away from the NASA site. They conduct their first crew operations, and their confidence begins to grow as they rotate crews and perform simulated EVAs.
As we see throughout the book, Zubrin is the alpha male of the project. We see a couple of potential project co-leaders--especially NASA's Pascal Lee--disagree with Zubrin, fall from his grace, and then fade from his view. Zubrin is an autocratic leader--he's clearly not a diplomat--you either agree with him or you're going to find the exit sooner or later.
There are a number of other issues I had with the book, beyond those of leadership--some of them were from "breaking sim" during the simulated EVAs. There are some other parts where I felt Zubrin and crew were grasping at straws and simply pretending. Zubrin wants us to think simulation integrity is very good, but there were times when credibility is stretched so thin that I can no longer suspend my disbelief.
Maybe those are the hurdles of getting such a project off the ground and running, because the project still exists today. They still run crews each late summer season since the early 2000s, so there's a point where you can no longer argue with a certain level of success.
There's an interesting counterpart book to Zubrin's that I think should be mentioned here: Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA on the Human Journey to the Red Planet, by William L. Fox. Fox visited NASA's research station on Devon Island, about a year after Zubrin broke ties with them. I expected a direct contrast to Mars on Earth, but refreshingly, it's not--Fox hardly mentions Zubrin or the Mars Society project, and doesn't air any dirty laundry from their disagreements with NASA. I did find Fox's perspective broader and more open-minded than Zubrin's, so it was good to have that mild counterpoint.
So Mars on Earth is a book only for those who are interested in learning about trying to live on Mars, and studying analog environments on earth to make that possible. Take it with a grain of salt, as you're really only getting the narrow view of the project's boss.
The mission of the project is for small groups of scientists to live and work in a cold, remote and dry place on earth--a Mars analog environment--and learn what it takes to succeed there.
Zubrin takes us through the genesis of the Mars Society project--it was apparently adopted as a sister project of an already-existing NASA project on Devon Island in the remote, northern Canadian wilderness. He describes the process of funding the project and the travails of building their first station, the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Friction develops between Zubrin and the NASA staff, tempers flare, and Zubrin finally breaks ties with the NASA project. The Mars Society project continues independently, not far away from the NASA site. They conduct their first crew operations, and their confidence begins to grow as they rotate crews and perform simulated EVAs.
As we see throughout the book, Zubrin is the alpha male of the project. We see a couple of potential project co-leaders--especially NASA's Pascal Lee--disagree with Zubrin, fall from his grace, and then fade from his view. Zubrin is an autocratic leader--he's clearly not a diplomat--you either agree with him or you're going to find the exit sooner or later.
There are a number of other issues I had with the book, beyond those of leadership--some of them were from "breaking sim" during the simulated EVAs. There are some other parts where I felt Zubrin and crew were grasping at straws and simply pretending. Zubrin wants us to think simulation integrity is very good, but there were times when credibility is stretched so thin that I can no longer suspend my disbelief.
Maybe those are the hurdles of getting such a project off the ground and running, because the project still exists today. They still run crews each late summer season since the early 2000s, so there's a point where you can no longer argue with a certain level of success.
There's an interesting counterpart book to Zubrin's that I think should be mentioned here: Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA on the Human Journey to the Red Planet, by William L. Fox. Fox visited NASA's research station on Devon Island, about a year after Zubrin broke ties with them. I expected a direct contrast to Mars on Earth, but refreshingly, it's not--Fox hardly mentions Zubrin or the Mars Society project, and doesn't air any dirty laundry from their disagreements with NASA. I did find Fox's perspective broader and more open-minded than Zubrin's, so it was good to have that mild counterpoint.
So Mars on Earth is a book only for those who are interested in learning about trying to live on Mars, and studying analog environments on earth to make that possible. Take it with a grain of salt, as you're really only getting the narrow view of the project's boss.
September 5, 2010
Zubrin is to be commended for both his enthusiasm and his energy is pushing the case for human space exploration, particulary that of Mars. And this was a worth experiment. However, it sidesteps the fact that we have yet to figure out a way of getting a heavy mass object such as a human habitation module safely to the surface of Mars. We know how to do it for the Moon and for Earth, but we have yet to figure out a way to do it for anything much larger than the car-sized Mars Science Laboratory currently planned to reach Mars in 2012. And this has nothing to do with getting there, we can get the mass there, we just don't know how to land it given the thin atmosphere of Mars vs. the thick atmosphere of Earth or the lack of atmosphere on the Moon.
February 14, 2016
Zubrin provides an entertaining look at the work leading up to the establishment of the Mars Society's simulation habitats in the arctic (on Devon Island, Canada) and in the desert (Utah). Through the use of crew diaries, he provides a clear idea of what it is like to be in one of the crews simulating life on Mars by wearing bubble-helmeted, gloved "spacesuits" outside for multi-week expeditions. But I most enjoyed one of the final chapters, "Lessons of the Sims", that summarizes the lessons learned from the simulations up to that point, and the impact those lessons should have on designs for actual Mars missions.
July 9, 2009
I deeply believe that humanity must look to the stars in the near future for the survival and expansion of our species, and this book gives a great insight to how the Mars Society, led by Robert Zubrin, is preparing to take us there.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews