Mars to Stay

• 1. Introduction

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  Mars to Stay is the proposal that the first astronauts sent to Mars should plan never to return. The reasoning is direct: returning from Mars is one of the most difficult and expensive parts of any mission. If the crew stays, those costs disappear. And if the crew stays, a settlement begins.

  Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the Moon during Apollo, became one of the most prominent voices for this idea. "Forget the Moon, Let's Head to Mars!" he told audiences in numerous forums. In June 2013 he framed the goal as something larger: a crewed mission to homestead Mars and make humanity a two-planet species.

  The idea has roots going back to a 1996 workshop presentation titled "One Way to Mars." Since then it has attracted astronauts, physicists, entrepreneurs, and artists. It has generated heated debates at Congressional hearings, op-eds in major newspapers, a television-backed private venture that eventually went bankrupt, and an anthology of mission architectures.

  What does a permanent Mars settlement actually look like? Who goes, and how do they survive? What are the real risks, and what would make the mission economically worthwhile? Those are the questions this documentary will work through.

• 2. The Case for One Way

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  Space activist Bruce Mackenzie put the core argument plainly at the 1998 International Space Development Conference. His presentation, titled "One Way to Mars: a Permanent Settlement on the First Mission", said the mission could be accomplished with less difficulty and expense if the astronauts were simply not required to come home.

  Physicist Paul Davies made the same argument in a 2004 op-ed for The New York Times. He described a starting colony of four astronauts equipped with a small nuclear reactor and a couple of rover vehicles. They would make their own oxygen, grow food, and use local raw materials for building projects. Regular shipments of food, medical supplies, and replacement equipment from Earth would keep the colony going indefinitely.

  The fuel problem sits at the heart of the cost argument. Blasting off the Martian surface requires fuel. If that fuel must be transported from Earth, mission costs soar. And because more fuel requires more launch mass, which requires still more fuel, the problem compounds. According to Lawrence Krauss, writing in The New York Times, relieving NASA of the need to send that return propellant could reduce overall mission costs by roughly a factor of ten, by some estimates.

  Krauss also ran informal surveys. A colleague accompanying scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological survey asked how many would accept a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised their hand.

• 3. How a Settlement Grows

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  Under Buzz Aldrin's version of the plan, the first humans to reach Mars would arrive as a six-member team. Subsequent missions would follow until Mars held around thirty people, at which point a genuine settlement would exist.

  Aldrin spelled out a specific life-course for the settlers. At age 30, select pioneers would be offered a chance to help settle Mars. Between ages 30 and 35 they would train and undergo social conditioning for long-duration isolation and the time delays in communications with Earth. From age 35 to 65 they would build and develop sheltered underground living spaces. At 65, first-generation settlers would be offered a choice: return to Earth or retire on Mars. As Aldrin himself said, "who knows what advances will have taken place. The first generation can retire there, or maybe we can bring them back."

  In August 2015, Aldrin, working with the Florida Institute of Technology, presented a master plan for NASA consideration. Under that plan, astronauts would serve a tour of duty of ten years, with the goal of establishing a colony before the year 2040.

  Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and Paul Davies of Arizona State University described a parallel architecture in The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet. Their first contingent would consist of a crew of four, ideally split between two two-person spacecraft for redundancy. Follow-up missions would keep arriving. The goal was to reach 150 or more individuals, which the authors considered a viable gene pool. Genetic engineering, they argued, could further support the health and longevity of settlers.

• 4. Building on the Surface

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  Robert Zubrin, whose 1996 book The Case for Mars was revised in 2011, detailed what the early construction phase would look like. Large pressurized habitats built underground would be the first serious shelter. Zubrin described building these as Roman-style atria cut into mountainsides, using Martian brick that could be produced on-site.

  Once basic habitation was established, hard-plastic radiation-resistant and abrasion-resistant geodesic domes could be deployed on the surface. These would eventually serve both as living quarters and as spaces for growing crops. Early industry would draw on local resources: plastics, ceramics, and glass could all be manufactured from Martian materials.

  Robots would prepare the initial base before any humans arrived. Because Mars has no ozone shield and no magnetosphere to block radiation, Schulze-Makuch and Davies suggested placing that base inside near-surface lava tubes and ice caves.

  Zubrin also described the longer-term project of terraforming Mars. The first phase would involve global warming, to release atmosphere trapped in the Martian regolith and to establish a water cycle. Three methods he outlined, best used together, were orbital mirrors to heat the surface, ground-based factories pumping halocarbons into the atmosphere, and bacteria seeded to metabolize water, nitrogen, and carbon, producing ammonia and methane to warm the planet further.

• 5. Risk and Reward

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  Zubrin addressed health risks directly in the fifth chapter of Mars Direct. Radiation and zero gravity both present real challenges, but he argued the scale is often overstated. Cancer rates do increase for astronauts with extensive time in space, but only marginally, in his assessment. Zero gravity weakens muscles and immune systems, yet near-total recovery is expected once settlers are living in Martian gravity.

  Martian gravity sits at 38 percent of Earth's. The Mars Gravity Biosatellite project was proposed to test how human bodies adapt to that specific level, but as of the time the source was written, no human had ever lived in Martian gravity. Long-term viability at 38 percent gravity remained a working assumption.

  Back-contamination, the fear that settlers might catch hypothetical Martian viruses, Zubrin dismissed in blunt terms. Because there are no host organisms on Mars for disease organisms to have evolved, he called the concern "just plain nuts."

  The economic case for Mars was also Zubrin's. Mars may contain concentrated metal deposits equal to or more valuable than silver that have never been touched by human extraction. Additionally, deuterium, a fuel essential to nuclear fusion power, is five times more concentrated on Mars than on Earth. Because labor on Mars would be scarce, wages would be high, and Zubrin proposed that this combination of resource wealth and a labor premium would make Mars a magnet for settlers and an engine of both technological and social advancement.

• 6. Mars One and Its Collapse

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  In 2012, Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp announced Mars One, a private not-for-profit foundation registered in the Netherlands as a Stichting. His plan was to send a communication satellite and a pathfinder lander to Mars by 2018, and then land four humans for permanent settlement in 2027, with a new group of four arriving every two years.

  The project drew enormous public response. Around 200,000 applications were started; roughly 2,500 were complete enough to be seriously considered. From those, one hundred applicants were selected. Mars One planned to narrow the field further to six groups of four before training began in 2016. Funding was expected to come from a reality television show, participant fees, and donations.

  Experts were skeptical from the start. Critics called the project a scam and described it as delusional. The funding model never materialized at the scale required. On the 15th of January 2019, a court decision ordered the organization liquidated, and Mars One went into bankruptcy administration.

  Eric Machmer proposed a middle path in the wake of Mars One's announcement, under the name "Strive to Stay." Conjunction-class missions would be planned with a default toward staying, contingent on health. At the end of each 550-day evaluation period, if no adverse health effects had been observed, settlers would continue into another 550-day period. Only once settlers confirmed that humans could live on Mars without serious harm would emergency return vehicles be converted into permanent research bases.

• 7. The Pioneer Analogy

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  Buzz Aldrin returned to a single historical comparison again and again. In a June 2010 interview with Vanity Fair, he asked: "Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars."

  In a May 2009 Popular Mechanics article, Aldrin set out his most comprehensive statement of the case. He argued that NASA's then-current lunar plan would "waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars" on a return to a destination where humans had already landed six times. He called the Moon a detour that would drain money and engineering talent for two decades. And he described the type of person who should go to Mars: not the traditional pilot or scientist or engineer, but someone flexible, inventive, and determined in the face of unpredictability. Survivors, in his word.

  Lawrence Krauss made the same historical argument. Colonists and pilgrims rarely set out for the New World with return tickets. "To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again."

  In a November 2010 television interview, Derrick Pitts, Planetarium Director at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, responded to these arguments by saying that one-way missions begin to open doors in a way that haven't been opened before. Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, said in January 2011 that privately funded one-way colonization flights were likely the only politically viable path, because no government would sanction the risk, and that the timing could fall within twenty years in the hands of a small group of tech billionaires.

• 8. A Community and a Future

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  The Mars Artists Community adopted Mars to Stay as their primary policy initiative, making the idea as much a cultural position as a technical proposal. During a 2009 public hearing of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, dozens of placards reading "Mars Direct Cowards Return to the Moon" appeared throughout the Carnegie Institute after Zubrin presented his arguments. The passionate response prompted the Mars Artists Community to produce several dozen additional designs, including "Traitors Return to Earth" and "What Would Zheng He Do?"

  In March 2011, Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell and Apollo 17 geologist Harrison Schmitt joined other Mars exploration advocates in publishing A One Way Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet, an anthology of Mars to Stay mission architectures. The book's closing chapter imagined daily life in a Martian colony through the story of Aurora, a young woman born on Mars.

  Other groups, including the Mars Underground, the Mars Homestead Project, the Mars Foundation, and the Mars Artists Community, have each formally adopted Mars to Stay policy positions. Writing in the Houston Chronicle in October 2009, Eric Berger described Mars to Stay as perhaps the only program with the potential to genuinely revitalize the United States space program, noting that removing the requirement to return astronauts could reduce mission costs by roughly a factor of ten.

  Zubrin, despite acknowledging that any Martian colony will remain partially Earth-dependent for centuries, ends his analysis on a specific note: deuterium at five times Earth's concentration, and metal ores untouched by millennia of extraction, waiting in the Martian regolith.