The Mars Delusion

This piece examines the persistent drive to put humans on Mars, tracing its emotional and cultural roots from 19th-century telescope misreadings - Schiaparelli’s “canali” becoming imagined canals under Percival Lowell - through the Apollo generation’s romanticism to today’s plutocratic space race. It contrasts zealotry and showmanship (Jeff Bezos’s “cool,” Elon Musk’s headline timelines and pivot to the Moon) with institutional plans (NASA eyeing a 2033 crewed mission, Chinese ambitions) and a revolution in launch economics - launch costs falling from roughly $54,000 per kilogram in the shuttle era to about $1,500/kg via reusable rockets - that has made long-range settlement seem plausible to many.

At the same time, the piece lays out detailed, pragmatic blueprints and the harsh realities they confront. Drawing on Robert Zubrin’s how-to, it describes Starship voyages of about six months, touchdown near northern permafrost (Karolev/Milankovic), initial crews of 50-100 cannibalizing ships to build out living modules, extracting water from permafrost, making cement from gypsum, smelting iron from regolith, running small fission reactors (with fusion aspirational), and relying on novel food sources like worms and spirulina. Those specifics serve an argument: enthusiasm and technical plans persist, but Mars is an unforgiving environment whose radiation, isolation and biological challenges could make settlement far more costly, dangerous and uncertain than dreamers admit.