When you’re evaluating an organization, I’ve always found it’s best to start with any observable outcomes, which you measure against what the organization set out to accomplish. When you spot a significant gulf between goal and execution, it behooves you look at the decision-makers.
With that in mind, let me introduce you to The Mars Society and its eccentric leader, Robert Zubrin. Here’s a profile from NBC News in 2018:
To say Robert Zubrin is passionate about Mars is a bit of an understatement. The 66-year-old aerospace engineer has devoted the better part of his life to thinking about and encouraging the exploration of Mars.
In 1998, Zubrin co-founded The Mars Society, a Lakewood, Colorado-based nonprofit, and in the years since has become an outspoken advocate for the establishment of a permanent settlement on Mars — and a harsh critic of what he considers NASA's stagnant human spaceflight program.
Robert Zubrin has degrees, patents and an impressive work history (including stints at Lockheed Martin and the Martin Marietta Astronautics company), as well as started his own aerospace company. His name can be found liberally sprinkled throughout any serious discussion of Space exploration or Mars colonization.
When looking at The Mars Society, however, a few things ought to ring more alarm bells. Let’s check in with a 2001 article from Wired:
25 researchers are spending a total of eight weeks at an exploration base on Devon Island in Canada's Northwest Territories, attempting to simulate what it would be like to live and work on Mars. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station is a $1 million outpost built on a chilly, meteor-blasted patch of polar desert that was chosen for its somewhat Mars-like conditions. …
To some, the Zubrin plan is downright visionary; to others, it's the work of a crank.
"Frankly, I think this is going nowhere," says physicist Robert Park, director of the Washington, DC, office of the American Physical Society and author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, a book that criticizes Zubrin's scheme as simplistic and unworkable.
"These Mars Society guys are fooling themselves about their plan and trying to fool others. I can't imagine why they think people would be willing to pay taxes to support a colony that returns nothing. Pick the worst place you can think of on Earth, and it's a Garden of Eden compared with Mars."
Park says Zubrin threatened legal action over passages in his book. He agreed to several changes, including the removal of a sentence that described Zubrin as "messianic."
So this “Mars Arctic Research Station” sounds like science, kinda...? I mean, it’s been going on for over two decades now.
Let’s take a little tour, courtesy of The Mars Society YouTube page:
Gee, diverse crowd.
My favorite part of the video may be the toilets (at 1:55, though c’mon folks — at least mop that disgusting floor, please), though a solid runner-up are the AC fans in hollow wooden backpacks that provide “good oxygen flow” to the fish bowls over the would-be Martians heads.
Robert Feynman would be left wondering where their bamboo launch pad was located.
Compare this with this recent Reuters video as NASA embarks on a year-long study where four inhabitants will live within a simulated 3D-printed habitat:
From the NASA press release:
To be as Mars-realistic as feasible, the crew also will face environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, and equipment failure.
Yeah, you don’t see any large running sink or toilets for these folks.
Both of these experiments, disparate as they are, bring to mind the controversial Biosphere 2. Between 1991-1994, two attempts were made to survive within a 3-acre closed loop ecosystem — both eventually collapsed under the weight of accumulated problems.
Here’s participant Mark Nelson with an account of his experience:
We contracted a syndrome psychologists call irrational antagonism. That is, we split into two groups of four. A power struggle over the project’s direction made things much worse. One side wanted new management and to reconfigure our mission priorities by deemphasizing closure and spending more time on science. The other side wanted to keep the project’s leadership and our objectives intact.
“It was really pretty awful,” one crewmate later recalled. “I could be so cold to the people in the other group, walking by them and not even looking at them.”
While there were no fistfights, one crew member complained years later she had been spit at. Twice.
Back then, The Mars Society felt confident humans could reach Mars -- optimistically within a decade. Obviously, that goal wasn’t reached. Let’s catch up with Dr. Zubrin, undeterred, speaking at the NASA Ames Research Center Director's Colloquium in July, 2014:
Now I’m not saying that clip has big Don Trump Jr.-energy behind it, but it’s worth noting Dr. Zubrin recently published a piece in The National Review (behind a paywall), titled “Wokeists Assault Space Exploration.” A scan of his Twitter reveals garden-variety old male grievance, like a RT of an article describing Richard Dreyfus wanting to “vomit” at Oscar diversity requirements.
So how did The Mars Society and Elon Musk come together? Let’s return to the Wired profile:
Zubrin's plan, dubbed Mars Direct, draws on current technology (sorta) to get to Mars within a decade (kinda) at a cost of only $30 billion (maybe). The price tag is only the most obvious red flag. NASA's own estimates of a manned mission to Mars have come in as high as $450 billion, and even allowing for the sort of bloat that has made the aerospace industry rich, that's a big difference. But hey, this isn't rocket science - it's rocket science funding.
“No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.” Everyone gets that, especially those at the Mars Society:
Folks at the Mars Society know that the government isn't likely to pay for a manned mission to Mars anytime soon. So, many in the group favor a people's mission to Mars, funded by a wealthy benefactor (attention, Bill Gates!) or perhaps a media company (in exchange for broadcast rights), or maybe even by ordinary citizens.
"There are hundreds of millions of people who think it's vital to our future that humanity expand into space," says Zubrin. "Well, gee, at $100 each, that's tens of billions of dollars."
Remember, this was 2001. So what was Elon Musk up to at the time?
Here’s CNN catching up with Elon that same year, who tells him his net worth has increased $100m (after the company he founded, X.com, was rebuilt into Peter Thiel’s PayPal):
“It got to the point where I didn’t really want to be, uh… I was neither well-suited to run a company of that size, nor was I particularly interested in running a 600+ person company. So I decided to remain a director of the company, but look for something else to do.”
“On a personal level at this point, I would say I’m a little tired of the Internet. The next company I do, one of the things that would be important is it has some long-term beneficial effect.”
For Elon to say leaving X.com was his own choice is, um, certainly one way to describe it.
In the same CNN interview, Elon described recent challenges to his health:
“I was in a hospital for two months. I got malaria when I visited South Africa. I came within 36 hours of dying.”
This brush with mortality perhaps sparked something in Elon. Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015), provides us insight for what happened next in an excerpt published on Bloomberg.
“He said, ‘The logical thing to happen next is solar, but I can’t figure out how to make any money out of it,’ ” said George Zachary, an investor and close friend of Musk’s, recalling a lunch date at the time. “He started talking about space, and I thought he meant office space like a real estate play.”
Elon envisioned a plan where mice (or perhaps a plant) could be sent to Mars to promote efforts here on Earth. The story picks up in Moscow:
In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile. He brought along Jim Cantrell, a kind of international aerospace supplies fixer, and Adeo Ressi, his best friend from Penn. Although Musk had tens of millions in the bank, he was trying to get a rocket on the cheap. They flew coach, and they were planning to buy a refurbished missile, not a new one. Musk figured it would be a good vehicle for sending a plant or some mice to Mars.
Ressi, a gangly eccentric, had been thinking a lot about whether his best friend had started to lose his mind, and he’d been doing his best to discourage the project.
To say the Russians at the time were unimpressed is a bit of an understatement. So Elon and company high-tailed it out of Moscow, as the excerpt continues:
“You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow,” Cantrell said. “It’s like, ‘My God. I made it.’ So, Griffin and I got drinks and clinked our glasses.” Musk sat in the row in front of them, typing on his computer. “We’re thinking, ‘F---ing nerd: What can he be doing now?’ ” At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he’d created.
“Hey, guys,” he said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”
Hey, no one ever accused Elon of lacking an economics degree. With the Internet losing luster as a place to grow his money, Elon sought new markets -- and that rough spreadsheet pointed the way to what eventually would become SpaceX.
The changes in his attitude and thinking were obvious to friends, including a group of PayPal executives who gathered in Las Vegas one weekend to celebrate the recent sale. “We’re all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on EBay,” said Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor. “He was studying it and talking openly about space travel and changing the world.”
Far be it from me to criticize a man developing a peculiar hobby. At this point in the story, Elon had relocated to Los Angeles.
The mild, consistent weather made it ideal for the aeronautics industry, which had been there since the 1920s, when Lockheed Aircraft set up shop in Hollywood. Howard Hughes, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Boeing, and a mosaic of support industries followed suit. While Musk’s space plans were vague at the time, he felt confident that he could recruit some of the world’s top aeronautics thinkers and get them to join his next venture.
And so we finally arrive at that fateful intersection of Elon and The Mars Society:
Musk started by crashing the Mars Society, an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet. They were holding a fund-raiser in mid-2001, a $500-per-plate event at the house of one of the well-off Mars Society members. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting.* “He gave us a check for $5,000,” Zubrin said. “That made everyone take notice.”
Oh, I’m sure it did.
* Good news! A comment from Max Wyvern actually fills in some blanks from the book’s author here on how Elon came to arrive at that fundraiser, check it out!
The excerpt continues:
When it was time for dinner, Zubrin placed Musk at the VIP table next to himself, the director and space buff James Cameron, and Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist for NASA. Musk loved it. “He was much more intense than some of the other millionaires,” Zubrin said. “He didn’t know a lot about space, but he had a scientific mind. He wanted to know exactly what was being planned in regards to Mars and what the significance would be.” Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated an additional $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert.
Elon appears to have found a kindred spirt in Dr. Zubrin back in 2001. Here’s Elon speaking at The Mars Society Virtual Convention in 2022, hosted by Dr. Zubrin:
At 2:50, Elon explains the challenge of making a Mars colony sustainable, near-term:
“It’s helpful to have as the objective the creation of a self-sustaining city on Mars. I think this has to be the objective, not simply a few people or a base, but a self-sustaining city. The acid test really is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars die out? For any reason. It could be banal, or it could be nuclear armageddon, doesn’t matter. …
“Are we going to create a self-sustaining city on Mars before or after World War III? And I think the problem with creating it after World War III — hopefully there’s never a World War III — is low.”
Elon goes on to provide a peek at the many insecurities he feels about the ground upon which we all stand, at 4:12:
”Really, we just face a series of probabilities, and there’s some chance we’ll have a giant war or a super-volcano, or you know, a comet might hit the Earth. We might just self-extinguish in some, um…. It might be more a whimper, than a bang.
”And frankly, right now, civilization is not looking super strong, you know. Looking a little rickety right now, to be frank.”
Readers, must you question why this theme keeps emerging in my diaries about how we as a country are utilizing our immense wealth and resources? Sure, an argument can be made (as Dr. Zurbin does in response to Musk in this video), that Elon’s Starship folly is no mere “lifeboat” or “escape vehicle,” it exists to make humanity “more robust.”
What happened to making the planet we live on, beset with a host of problems, more robust? Elon isn’t any closer to a human being setting foot on Mars now than Dr. Zubrin was back in 2001.
Tax Musk. Fund NASA. Get a better result.
Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.