Let's move to Mars: the best books about our future in space
It’s no longer a question of whether we’re going to Mars, but when. By the time we reach a second planet – probably in the 2030s – we’ll probably have a base or two on the moon as well. But will people ever live beyond Earth permanently?
Hazards abound on the red planet, a world that is colder and drier than Antarctica and without the luxury of breathable air. Andy Weir provides an excellent picture of the struggle to survive in his novel The Martian. Kim Stanley Robinson takes a deeper dive with his Mars trilogy. The series follows the first 100 settlers, a hand-picked crew of scientists and engineers who gradually transform the climate. There is plenty of engineering and biology, but Robinson broadens into philosophy when he explores how some settlers want to keep Mars pure and red, while others view the life that greens the planet as a gift from humanity. And alternative history is just around the corner when another wave of colonists arrive, dreaming of breaking away from planet Earth.
Women may require fewer calories, reducing kilograms and cost for any mission launching from Earth, but governments have proved unwilling to let them take the lead. Martha Ackmann’s The Mercury 13 tells the story of the women Nasa trained as part of the Mercury programme in the 1960s, and how the US president Lyndon
Johnson denied them the opportunity to fly. It wasn’t until 1983 that Sally Ride became the first US female astronaut in space, and the sexist culture at Nasa is the backdrop for To Space and Back, a book for younger readers that is as informative as it is aspirational. She explains what it’s like to eat, sleep, bathe or use the toilet in zero gravity – subjects that Mary Roach expands on in her lighthearted study of living in space, Packing for Mars. Sex, in particular, is fraught with difficulties in zero gravity, where Newton’s third law can make action and reaction a messy affair.
Mars may be cold and dry, but a gravitational field 38% as strong as Earth’s may be enough to support growth and development in humans. Robert Zubrin provides a blueprint for settling the red planet in The Case for Mars, laying out how we can get there, establish camps and harvest energy, oxygen and food from the materials we find. He ventures further in The Case for Space, where he outlines the opportunities for mining in the asteroid belt and beyond. Gravity on the frigid moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely to be too weak to support humans. But perhaps the next century will find us using artificial gravity to live throughout the solar system. In 1977, Gerald O’Neill described in The High Frontier how the massive rotating spheres this would require are surprisingly straightforward to build.
Our dreams of voyaging in space are even older than that. Jules Verne’s 1865 adventure story From the Earth to the Moon is eerily prescient. More than a century before Apollo 11, Verne imagines a giant cannon built in Florida with great controversy and at great expense, which launches three men in a capsule. They fire retrorockets to land on the moon and eventually return to splash down in the Pacific Ocean. The next few centuries may see us travel to Mars and beyond, but human explorers will find that writers have already planted the flag of the imagination on all these new horizons.
• Spacefarers by Christopher Wanjek is published by Harvard.