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Last September, Elon Musk utilized the social media service he acquired for £35bn to remind everyone that he had greater ambitions than the impending US presidential election. “The first Starships intended for Mars will launch in two years when the subsequent Earth-Mars transfer window opens,” he shared on X. “These initial missions will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing safely on Mars. Should those landings succeed, the first crewed missions to Mars will follow four years later.”
Then, he made a bold reiteration of even more ambitious aspirations. “The flight rate will increase exponentially from that point forward,” he declared, “aiming to create a self-sustaining city in roughly 20 years.” For those who continue to question whether this objective should indeed be prioritized as he evidently perceives, he concluded with a familiar assertion: “Becoming a multiplanetary species will significantly extend the probable duration of consciousness, as we will not be putting all our eggs, both literally and metabolically, in a single basket.”
Musk’s company SpaceX, established in 2001 and currently valued at £350bn, predominantly generates revenue from launching satellites. The Starship, recognized as the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever constructed, is its most famous rocket, whose sixth test flight was observed by a delighted Donald Trump (the fifth test had the Starship’s rocket booster captured by “mechazilla” robotic arms, a moment that propelled Musk’s fame to new heights). This innovation, Musk insists, is essential to SpaceX’s so-called Mars colonization initiative and the dream of humanity residing on the red planet. There is, however, one complication: most Mars specialists doubt that his existing timeline is in any manner feasible – despite many acknowledging his role in reawakening public interest in Mars and initiating the lengthy and challenging journey toward setting foot on its soil.
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Top: the Mars Exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which launched in 2003, were not equipped to take ‘selfies’ but regularly captured their own shadows during late afternoons
Above: on 9 March 2012, Opportunity was perched on the edge of Endeavour crater, with a clear view of its far side 14 miles away. The bedrock at the rim was the oldest Opportunity examined and was formed during Mars’s earliest, wettest geological time. The camera’s sensitivity results in an exaggerated color.
In this regard, Musk and his promotional efforts represent the latest installment in a narrative that stretches back six decades. In 1964, a NASA invention dubbed Mariner 4 produced the first blurry surface images of Mars. Seven years later, both the US and Soviet Union successfully launched missions that orbited the planet: one Soviet lander made it to the surface but malfunctioned within minutes, whereas NASA’s Mariner 9 orbiter unveiled topography indicating that Mars possessed intriguingly Earth-like characteristics. Then, in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers not only analyzed soil specimens on the surface but also transmitted strikingly vivid images of their landing sites, revealing a vast expanse of rust-colored rock and pastel-hued skies.
I am old enough to recall the awe inspired by those images: in contemporary terms, the red planet immediately became relatable. It was easy to envision humans someday traveling there and navigating its barren landscape; equally plausible was the idea that, in such an Earth-like environment, we might discover evidence of life: remnants from the past – or perhaps, even more astonishingly, from the present.
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In 1980, the Viking 1 orbiter was assigned the task of capturing a series of color images of Mars’s entire surface. Eventually, in 1992, NASA unveiled a seamless, digital, rectangular color map of the planet, from which these four global views were derived. They offer a unique perspective, resembling a view of Mars from a spacecraft flying only 2,000km above it.
The intricacies of NASA’s Mars narrative are relayed to me during an intriguing Zoom conversation with Jim Green, an endlessly optimistic and remarkably articulate 73-year-old who became part of the agency in 1980 and ultimately led its Planetary Science Division, overseeing the launch of probes to Venus and Jupiter – as well as some of NASA’s most ambitious Mars explorations. He retired from NASA in 2022, but continues to work in the same realm and eagerly acknowledges his obsession with Mars: for an upcoming book of photographs from NASA archives featuring the planet, he has penned a penetrating essay on the historical context of missions to Mars and the planet’s 4.6 billion-year history.
“The intent of Viking was, ‘Let’s find life,’” he confides. “But our discoveries indicated it was an overly ambitious goal. The rationale was that we placed those landers in the safest regions we could conceive. Imagine Martians arriving on Earth: ‘Let’s land in this area of northern Africa that appears flat and secure, and we’ll search for life there.’ They land in the Sahara desert and fail to find anything. Today we understand that the location we chose was the least promising spot to explore.”
There was a hiatus in NASA’s Mars explorations between 1982 and 1996, as meticulous efforts were made to rectify that error. The 1990s witnessed a series of setbacks – not solely for the US, but also for Mars missions launched by Russia and Japan. However, two successful landings sparked renewed interest in the planet – and in 2001, after entering Mars’s orbit, a US spacecraft named Mars Odyssey discovered signs of “potential subsurface water.” NASA swiftly intensified its focus on locating past H2O sites – where, as Green suggests, there could be “various indications of ancient life” – as well as regions of the planet where water might exist.
still be present.
In 2004, a Nasa rover known as Opportunity unearthed the mineral hematite, a definitive indication that water had previously existed. It achieved this while covering 28 miles across the terrain over a span of more than 14 years – capturing breathtaking visuals such as the perspective from Mars’s Endeavour crater towards a cerulean horizon 14 miles distant. Even more than the photographs from the Viking missions, these images depicted a landscape that was at once unsettlingly extraterrestrial and intriguingly recognizable.
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Top: self-portraits of the Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, were captured with an arm-mounted camera. This remarkable image was taken on 5 August 2015 at a sampling location named Buckskin – similar to a human, the rover is incapable of seeing its own ‘elbow’ or ‘hand’ when snapping a selfie
Above: tracks imprinted by Curiosity across a sand dune at Dingo Gap, 2014
The pinnacle of Green’s tenure at Nasa was the triumphant landing of Curiosity, a rover comparable in size to a family car that was launched in November 2011 and touched down on Mars the ensuing August: he retains vivid memories of anxiously observing its final descent from a control room, acutely conscious that the fate of his career was at stake. “It either landed on the surface disassembled, leading to my termination, or it succeeded: we found out only when we got the signal that it had landed.”
Everything unfolded as intended, and Nasa subsequently possessed “a fantastic machine that was set to transform our understanding”. Curiosity not only relayed crystal-clear footage of the surface – 5,000 individuals congregated in Times Square to witness its inaugural video broadcast – but also discovered carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. To quote from Green’s essay, this constituted evidence “that Mars, with its ample early water reserves, must have been a livable environment at some point in its ancient past.”
What he is still anticipating is an even more significant disclosure. “Mars is the location where I believe we will resolve the question, are we alone?” he states. “And it’s truly going to necessitate humans traversing the planet to locate extant life.” He underscores those final two words to emphasize what a revolutionary change this would signify. “That life isn’t going to be found on the surface. It’s going to exist in subterranean aquifers.” Any Martian organisms, just to clarify, would likely be microbial, but their discovery would still denote an almost inconceivable scientific and cultural milestone. So does he genuinely believe there is life there? “Oh, I think there is. Today.”
Green’s present fixation is the theoretical work on terraforming Mars: altering its climate and atmosphere to render it more conducive to human habitation. In practical terms, it is challenging to elucidate what this would involve and the technological advancements it would necessitate, but the fundamental requirement would be a massive magnetic shield between Mars and the Sun, allowing the planet to retain more warmth and elevate its atmospheric pressure – both of which would open up the surreal potential for humans to move freely about.
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Top: numerous craters on Mars appear to have been filled with sediment at some point. Long parched, the sediments are being eroded by wind-driven sand. Some layers exhibit greater resistance to erosion than others, producing the tiered ridges and valleys visible in Danielson crater
Above: spreading between Curiosity’s landing site and the rocks at the base of Gale crater’s central peak was an extensive field of dark sand dunes, formed from pulverised fragments of volcanic rock. Curiosity approached the steep incline of a dune labeled Namib on 17 December 2015. The horizontal cracks and alcove-like scarps indicate that the dune is actively shifting
“You must conceive of terraforming in stages,” he explains. “So what constitutes the initial phase of terraforming? We need to elevate the atmospheric pressure. Currently, it sits at six millibars. If we can increase it to 60, then we won’t require spacesuits to wander the surface. Humans will possess significantly greater mobility, and our machines will operate more efficiently.”
These are presumably the visions that drive Elon Musk, leading me to an unavoidable query: what is Green’s opinion on SpaceX’s aspirations?
“Elon has some remarkable qualities. He is truly quite a space enthusiast, envisioning the future and desiring it to manifest sooner rather than later, and doing everything in his power to facilitate that. However, he is also exceedingly unrealistic regarding his timelines. We are not going to be landing 30, 40, or 50 people on Mars anytime soon.”
And is the principal issue not so much our technology, but rather the fact that we simply do not possess enough knowledge about what awaits the first humans embarking on this journey? “We are nearing the threshold. Likely within the next eight to 10 years, we will have all the information essential for humans to land. We have been grappling with pinpointing the landing site since 2015, and we have yet to reach a conclusion. Our concept is to land in what is termed an exploration zone: an area roughly 200km in diameter.”
He pauses momentarily, envisioning the endeavors humans will undertake once they finally get to traverse the barren terrains that all those Nasa devices have documented. “We’re going to extract ice and obtain water. We’re going to collect the minerals and even manufacture medicines from them. We’re going to engage in all the necessary activities to survive on that planet. And that’s in a region we’re going to revisit for centuries to come.
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The spacecraft Mars Odyssey introduced advanced imaging technology for photographing the planet, allowing the surface to be observed both during the day and at night. In 2006, daytime images (which depict topography in black and white) were merged with nighttime visuals (which reveal temperature, from chilly blue to warm red). At night, bedrock exposed on the Meridiani Planum plain and in crater rims retains warmth, thus appearing relatively warm in comparison to dust-laden areas
“We are unaware of where the exploration zone lies. We had 55 potential candidates. Currently, it has likely been narrowed down to 45, but we are yet to identify the top three or four. I believe we have another decade ahead. And only then we will be able to declare, ‘This is it.’”
In all he articulates, one steadfast belief shines through: that humanity will indeed reach Mars – not quite as swiftly as Musk predicts, but sooner than many anticipate. “Well, I want it accomplished within my lifetime,” Green expresses with a smile. “I’ve always told my daughter I’ll become a centenarian, without a doubt. So in the upcoming 25 years. That would be remarkable.”
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