NeoScience Daily · SUN 25 OCT 2026 · Issue 04

Mars: how it kills you and who wants to take us there

Cold enough to kill you, and still everyone wants to go: its moons, its giant basin and the 1965 probe that flew past.

Why does everyone want to go to Mars?

Why does Mars get more attention than every other planet put together? Why does Mars make grown scientists cry at press conferences, why does the richest man in the world want to send us there, and why should you and I give a damn?

People have been asking some version of that for as long as we've looked up, and nobody can tell you for sure whether Mars holds our future. Sure, saving humanity is a great pitch, but Mars couldn't care less. It sits about 140 million miles away on average, and it's losing its air to the solar wind a little more every second, never once wondering whether or not humanity is coming to its dusty surface.

And yes, maybe Mars had rivers and lakes once, a lot like ours. But that was billions of years ago. Step out onto Mars today without a suit and the water on your tongue and in your lungs starts to boil. Fancy a glass of water? Are you parched? My, that's unfortunate, because liquid water pretty much can't stick around on the surface of Mars. And that goes for the water in your body as well. Fancy a nighttime stroll? Well, assuming you don't mind the -110 Fahrenheit temperature and the lack of oxygen in the air, you're still going to start boiling from the inside out, lungs first. I have a feeling it's not going to feel so good.

So that's what this issue is about: why on earth you and I should care about this antisocial killer red dot, and why we maybe shouldn't. Along the way we'll get into the science of its deadly dust, who's trying to ship us there and why, how Mars ended up so different from Earth, the overengineered nuclear robots doing donuts on its rocky surface, and whether, even after all that, it could harbor humanity's next step for mankind, or just a suicidal leap for boiling billionaires.

But first you need to know where Mars lives, because with Mars, where it sits explains almost everything.

How Mars lost its air

THE WIND THAT TOOK IT The solar wind is a stream of particles, mainly protons and electrons, flowing from the Sun at about one million miles per hour. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks a global magnetic field to deflect it.

A SLOW THEFT NASA's MAVEN mission measured the solar wind stripping gas at about 1/4 pound every second. Its team determined that most of the gas ever present in the Martian atmosphere has been lost to space.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR NASA's InSight confirmed in 2021 that the center of Mars is molten. Watch for why the planet lost its shield anyway.

Fourth rock from the Sun, and Earth's dead twin

Mars is fourth in line from the Sun, about 142 million miles out, roughly one and a half times as far as we are. That puts it right on the outer edge of the habitable zone, the band around the Sun where a planet could keep liquid water on its surface. Depending on whose definition you use, Mars is just inside that band or just outside it. Either way it's standing in the doorway, and we're about to knock.

Mars is also the last rocky planet. Past it you hit the asteroid belt, then the giants. Jupiter and Saturn are almost entirely hydrogen and helium, while Uranus and Neptune are mostly ice and gas, and none of them has a surface you could stand on. Looking inward doesn't help much either. Mercury bakes at over 750 °F on its day side. Venus is closer to us than Mars and almost exactly our size, but its surface sits at about 869 °F under air 90 times thicker than ours. So if you go through the whole lineup, Mars is the only other planet where you or I could stand on solid ground in a suit and live. A pretty low bar, sure, but Mars is the only one that clears it.

How far Mars is from us depends on where we both are in our orbits. On a good day, Mars comes within about 34 million miles of the nearest 7-Eleven. When it's hiding on the far side of the Sun, it's around 250 million miles away. A radio message traveling at the speed of light takes anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes to reach it, so you can't really FaceTime Mom and Dad from Mars, and when someone needs to vent about the Martian gossip, they have to vent alone.

On paper Mars looks like a smaller, colder copy of home. It's about half our width and about a tenth of our mass, so its gravity pulls at 38 percent of what you feel right now. Its day lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes, close enough that your body clock would barely notice. It tilts on its axis about 25 degrees, almost the same as our 23.4, so Mars does have some promising attributes. Its year lasts 687 of our days, though, so each of those seasons drags on about twice as long.

That's where the family resemblance ends tho. Mars's air is about 95 percent carbon dioxide, and it's less than 1 percent as thick as the air you're breathing at sea level. Mars averages about -76 °F. On a summer afternoon at its equator, the ground at your feet can hit about 68 °F while the air around your head sits near freezing, and on a winter night at its poles Mars drops to about -240 °F, so you'll have to pack heavy for this one.

Even so, Mars wasn't always like this. Orbiters and rovers keep finding the leftovers of water all over it: dried-up river valleys, old lake beds and deltas. A delta is the fan of sand and mud a river dumps where it slows down and runs into a lake, the same shape you see at the mouth of the Mississippi. Take Gale crater, the giant bowl where Curiosity landed. Curiosity drove up to rounded pebbles cemented into the rock, the kind you only get when water has tumbled stones down a stream for a long time, and NASA reckons that stream ran somewhere around ankle to hip deep. Further in, it found mudstone, rock made from fine mud that only settles out in calm, still water, and the chemistry in it says the old lake wasn't too salty or too acidic. A scientist on the mission said that if you'd been dying of thirst back then, you could have drunk it. Then there's Jezero crater, 28 miles across, where Perseverance landed. From orbit you can still see the fan-shaped delta a river left behind as it poured into the crater's lake, and Perseverance has found boulders in it that only a serious flood could have carried in. So roughly 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, Mars had rivers, lakes, thicker air and probably a warmer climate. It had a real shot.

Its size took that away. Small planets lose their inner heat faster, and as Mars's core cooled, its global magnetic field ran out of double A batteries around 4 billion years ago. Luckily ours is still running triple A with an extended warranty, and it's what deflects the solar wind, the stream of charged particles the Sun throws off. Mars lost that shield. NASA's MAVEN orbiter, the one that's been watching over Mars since 2014, measured the solar wind peeling gas off the top of Mars's atmosphere at about 3.5 ounces every second, much faster during solar storms. Sure, 3.5 ounces a second sounds like nothing, but keep that up for billions of years and you lose most of an atmosphere, which is exactly what the MAVEN team thinks happened to Mars.

That thin air is why Mars can't hold on to liquid water. Its surface pressure sits right around the point where water can't stay liquid for long, so it freezes, or it boils off into vapor, sometimes both in the same day. Mars didn't lose all of it, though. Plenty is still there, locked up as ice, and that ice is the biggest reason anyone takes living on Mars seriously. We'll come back to it.

So Mars is pretty much what Earth would turn into if we lost our magnetic field and most of our air. It had everything it needed for life, and then it lost it. The funny thing is, people stared at Mars for centuries and saw something completely different, and a lot of what they saw was never there.

Landforms of Mars

A VOLCANO WITH A RECORD Mars is home to the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. The first picture shows it from orbit.

OPEN TO IMPACTS Mars' sparse atmosphere doesn't offer much protection from impacts by such objects as meteorites, asteroids, and comets.

PLENTY OF GROUND The surface of Mars has nearly the same area as Earth's dry land. On it is a canyon, the largest in the solar system, that extends about 2,400 miles in length.

WIDE AND DEEP Hellas has a diameter of 1,400 miles and a depth of over 4.3 miles.

SHAPED OVER MANY YEARS The Isidis basin formed due to a major impact during the heavy bombardment epoch. Volcanoes, impact craters, crustal movement, and atmospheric conditions such as dust storms have altered the Martian landscape over many years.

The red wanderer

Nobody discovered Mars. It's one of the brightest things in the night sky, and anyone who has ever looked up on a clear night has seen it, so the history of Mars is really the story of us figuring out what Mars is, and getting it hilariously wrong along the way.

Ancient sky watchers noticed two things about Mars: it's red, and it wanders. Most stars keep their places night after night, however Mars drifts across them, and every couple of years it even appears to back up for a few weeks before carrying on, like someone who missed their exit. Egyptian astronomers called it Her Desher, the red one. The Babylonians tied it to Nergal, their god of war and plague, which makes perfect sense when you don't think about it, and the Greeks and Romans kept the theme going with Ares and Mars, both gods of war, so Mars has had anger issues on its permanent record ever since.

That color everyone reads as blood comes from iron in Mars's dust. For decades scientists blamed hematite, which is basically dry rust, the same stuff that flakes off an old bike left out in the rain. That being said, a 2025 study points to a different iron mineral called ferrihydrite, and ferrihydrite only forms when there's water around. So if that holds up, Mars didn't just rust, it rusted while it was still wet.

Mars also wrecked astronomy's favorite idea. For about 2,000 years astronomers were sure planets moved in perfect circles, because circles were perfect and the heavens were supposed to be perfect too. In the late 1500s a Danish astronomer named Tycho Brahe spent decades recording where the planets were, night after night, more precisely than anyone had ever managed without a telescope. After he died, his assistant Johannes Kepler inherited the data and spent years trying to make Mars fit a circle. Mars's orbit is one of the more stretched-out ones in the solar system, however, and no matter how Kepler arranged his circles, Mars kept showing up in the wrong place. In 1609, after years of fighting with Tycho's numbers, he finally gave up on circles and published the answer: planets move in ellipses, which are stretched circles, or an oval if you're so inclined. Every orbit we calculate today, from the Moon to the satellites in your phone's GPS, comes from that, so Mars totally ruined centuries of idealized perfection while just chilling in the sky.

After Mars's bad behavior changed humanity's perspective on the heavens and beyond, telescopes started to get good, real good in fact, good enough to see Mars's bright red face. In 1659 Christiaan Huygens sketched a dark triangle on it, now called Syrtis Major, the first feature anyone ever drew on another planet, and by watching that triangle turn he guessed that Mars's day was about 24 hours long. In 1666 Giovanni Cassini timed it at 24 hours and 40 minutes, only about 3 minutes off, which is honestly impressive for a man squinting through a 17th century telescope. Astronomers also watched white caps at Mars's poles grow in winter and shrink in summer, and in the 1780s William Herschel worked out that Mars tilts on its axis and has seasons a lot like ours. So now people had a planet with a day like ours, seasons like ours and ice caps like ours, and you can guess where everyone's imagination went next.

In 1877 Mars swung unusually close to Earth, and two things happened. In Washington, Asaph Hall at the US Naval Observatory went looking for moons around Mars, and he was about ready to call it quits, but his wife Angeline told him "**** **** ***", which motivated him to get back out there. Within a week he'd found both of them, and he named them Phobos and Deimos, fear and dread, after the sons of the war god, because Mars's family branding was already sunshine and rainbows. Meanwhile in Milan, Giovanni Schiaparelli was mapping Mars and drew a network of dark lines he called canali, which in Italian just means channels. English speakers read it as canals, however, and canals are something somebody builds.

Percival Lowell, a rich Bostonian with a lot of free time, ran with it. In 1894 he built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and spent years drawing hundreds of canals on Mars, and he argued they were irrigation works built by a dying civilization dragging water down from the poles to keep its crops alive. The public ate it up like Doritos, and H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, in which the Martians came here instead of us going there. Most astronomers weren't buying it, and sure enough, sharper telescopes never showed a single canal. What people had been seeing was their own eyes connecting faint smudges into lines at the very limit of what their telescopes could show, much like constellations or hidden messages in the clouds. What can I say, we've always been a creative bunch.

The dream died on 15 July 1965. NASA's Mariner 4 flew past Mars and sent home 21 pictures plus part of a 22nd, and they showed a dry face covered in craters that looked a lot more like the Moon than like home. There were no canals, no cities and no water, and a lot of people felt like they'd been stood up. In 1971 Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft ever to orbit another planet, and it showed up in the middle of a dust storm covering all of Mars, so it sat there and waited for the storm to clear like someone stuck in traffic. When it did clear, Mariner 9 mapped giant volcanoes and a canyon long enough to stretch across the United States, and that canyon is now called Valles Marineris, after the spacecraft. Then in 1976 NASA's Viking 1 and 2 landed on Mars and went looking for life directly, and what they found, we're still arguing about. We'll get there.

Every generation has looked at Mars and seen what it wanted to see: war, a civilization, a second Earth. The real Mars turned out to be better at killing you than any of those stories ever imagined.

Why Mars is red, on Planetary Radio

THE RED PLANET QUESTION This episode of Planetary Radio, from The Planetary Society, asks what gives Mars its colour. For a long time the working idea was that iron in the soil reacted with small amounts of water and oxygen to form hematite, a familiar kind of rust. The host talks with a planetary scientist whose new study points to a different iron mineral in the dust.

A MINERAL THAT HOLDS WATER The guest's team combined orbital and rover data with lab experiments that simulated Martian dust, and found that a water-bearing iron mineral matches the surface better than hematite does. The episode is careful to say this refines the older picture instead of discarding it, and that it suggests the planet rusted while liquid water was still around.

FROM WET PAST TO DUST Asked about the timeline of water, the guest describes liquid water meeting volcanic rock long ago, then the planet losing its atmosphere and drying out. Wind erosion of those rocks made dust, and global dust storms spread it around, which is how he explains the whole planet looking red rather than only a few wet regions.

Who found Phobos

Asaph Hall (1829 to 1907). Asaph Hall discovered Phobos on Aug. 17, 1877.

How Mars kills you

So say you make it. You land, you suit up, and you open the door. Here's how Mars says hello.

First, the air. Mars's surface pressure is about 0.6 percent of ours, and below a line called the Armstrong limit, water boils at body temperature, which is about 98.6 °F instead of the 212 °F you're used to on the stove. Mars sits way below that line. Your blood pressure keeps the blood inside your veins from boiling, so at least there's that, however the spit on your tongue, the tears on your eyes and the moisture in your lungs aren't so lucky, and your skin swells up as the water in your tissue turns to vapor. Honestly, that part won't bother you for long, because the air is almost all carbon dioxide and you'd pass out from lack of oxygen in about 15 seconds. So on Mars, pressurized suits and habitats aren't an optional upgrade, they're the entire plan.

Then there's the cold. Mars averages -76 °F, its nights get a lot colder than that, and since its air is too thin to hold onto heat, the temperature swings hard between day and night, like a desert with the thermostat ripped out. That being said, the cold is the easiest problem on this list, which tells you something about the list.

Radiation is the quiet one. On Earth our magnetic field and our thick air block most of the high-energy particles flying around space, which are cosmic rays from far outside the solar system plus bursts of particles the Sun throws during solar storms. Mars has neither shield, so those particles go straight through the air, through your suit, and through you. Curiosity carries a radiation detector, and it measured about 0.67 millisieverts a day on the surface. A millisievert is just the unit doctors use for radiation dose, and a chest X-ray is about a tenth of one, so standing on Mars gives you about as much radiation as seven chest X-rays, every single day, and your dentist would not approve. The trip is worse. Curiosity measured about 1.8 millisieverts a day on the way there, and the team worked out that a round trip with today's rockets would hit you with about 660 millisieverts before you ever set foot on Mars. NASA's limit for an astronaut's whole career is 600, so just getting there and back burns through an entire career's worth. Over the years that raises your risk of cancer, and it might damage your brain and heart as well, which is why anyone living on Mars long term would be living underneath a few yards of Martian dirt, like a very expensive hobbit.

About that dirt. In 2008 NASA's Phoenix lander scooped up soil near Mars's north pole and found perchlorates, salts that make up about half a percent of the soil. In people, perchlorate gets in the way of your thyroid, the gland in your neck that sets how fast your body burns energy. Here on Earth perchlorate is what goes into rocket fuel and fireworks, and Mars just has it lying around in the dirt. Thinking of starting a little garden? Bad news, and it gets worse, because a 2017 lab study found that under Mars's ultraviolet light, perchlorates turn into very effective bacteria killers. So Mars has the worst potting soil in the solar system, and it's actively trying to sterilize anything you plant in it.

Then there's the dust, which gets its own paragraph because it gets into everything. Mars's dust is finer than talcum powder, ground down by billions of years of wind with no rain to ever wash it away. It's electrically charged, so it clings to everything it touches, the way a balloon sticks to your hair after you rub it on your head, except this balloon is a whole planet and it's sticking to your suit, your seals, your solar panels and your lungs. It carries those same perchlorates, and it's fine enough to get deep into your chest. The Apollo astronauts got a preview of this on the Moon: dust came into their cabin on their suits, and within days it was irritating their eyes and throats, and that was after three days, whereas anyone living on Mars would be breathing around it for years.

Mars also throws dust storms, small ones all the time, and every few years they merge into one storm that wraps the entire planet and blocks out the Sun for months, which is Mars's version of slamming the door. Mars did exactly that in 2018, and NASA's Opportunity rover, which ran on solar panels, slowly ran out of power in the dark. Opportunity sent its last message on 10 June 2018. It was built to last 90 days, and it had been driving for almost 15 years, so it outlived its warranty about sixty times over, and in the end only the dust could stop it.

Last, the gravity. Mars pulls at 38 percent of what Earth does, so you'd jump nearly three times higher, which is fun for about a week. We already know what zero gravity does to a body, because astronauts on the space station lose about 1 to 1.5 percent of the bone in their hips and spine every month, and their muscles and hearts get weaker too. What 38 percent does over years, however, nobody knows, because nobody has ever lived in it. Nobody knows if a pregnancy would go normally on Mars, or whether a kid could grow up healthy there, so whoever goes first finds out with their own body.

So Mars will suffocate you, freeze you, cook you with radiation, poison you, sandblast you and slowly hollow out your bones. Naturally, our first move was to send robots instead, really expensive ones, and a couple of them run on plutonium.

A probe's first look at Mars

A probe passed Mars, took its pictures, and stayed in contact as it moved away from Earth.

The closest approach The probe made its closest approach, 6,120 miles from the Martian surface, at 01:00:57 UT 15 July 1965.

The pictures It took 21 pictures plus 21 lines of a 22nd picture.

A long goodbye NASA maintained contact with the spacecraft until Oct. 1, 1965, when the probe was 192 million miles from Earth.

The overengineered nuclear robots

Mars is the only planet we know of that's inhabited entirely by robots. Since Mariner 4 we've thrown dozens of missions at Mars, and a big chunk of them crashed, went silent or never showed up at all, so engineers call Mars a spacecraft graveyard, and Mars has earned the name.

The rovers that did make it got bigger every time. Sojourner, in 1997, was the size of a microwave. Spirit and Opportunity landed in 2004, about the size of golf carts, ran on solar panels and were only expected to last 90 days. Spirit kept going for six years before Mars swallowed its wheels in a patch of soft sand, and Opportunity drove about 28 miles over nearly 15 years, which is a full marathon on a planet with no roadside assistance. Between them they proved Mars once had liquid water, even though they spent their whole lives at the mercy of dust piling up on their solar panels, like trying to charge your phone under a blanket.

So for the next two, NASA went nuclear. Curiosity landed in Gale crater in August 2012, and Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. Each one is about the size of a small car and weighs roughly a ton, and each one carries a generator holding about 10.6 pounds of plutonium dioxide, which is plutonium-238 bonded to oxygen. Before you panic, this isn't the plutonium that goes in bombs. Plutonium-238 just runs hot as it slowly decays, and the generator turns that heat straight into electricity, day and night, through dust storms and winters, for well over a decade. It puts out about 110 watts when it's new, which is roughly one old-fashioned light bulb, to run a laboratory on wheels that cost somewhere between two and a half and almost three billion dollars. The leftover heat gets piped around the inside of the rover to keep its electronics warm, so the rover is basically wearing its own space heater. Curiosity has been running on that generator since 2012, and it's still out there driving.

Getting a one-ton rover onto Mars in one piece is a whole other problem. The spacecraft hits the top of Mars's atmosphere at about 12,000 miles per hour and has roughly seven minutes to get down to zero. A radio signal takes longer than seven minutes to get back to Earth, however, so by the time the engineers hear the spacecraft has started its landing, it has already landed or crashed, and they're sitting in a room watching something that's already over. NASA calls it the seven minutes of terror. A heat shield takes the first blast of heat as the spacecraft slams into the air, then a parachute built to open at faster than the speed of sound slows it down further, and then comes the part that sounds made up. A rocket-powered platform called the sky crane hovers about 66 feet above the ground and lowers the rover down on cables, then it cuts the cables and flies off to crash itself somewhere out of sight, like a waiter who drops your plate on the table and sprints out the back door. It sounds like something somebody drew on a napkin, and yet it has worked twice.

Perseverance brought passengers too. Ingenuity was a 4-pound helicopter, and on 19 April 2021 it made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Flying on Mars is ridiculous, by the way, because Mars's air is so thin that Ingenuity's blades had to spin at about 2,500 revolutions per minute just to get off the ground, several times faster than a helicopter's blades spin on Earth. It was only supposed to fly five times as a test, and it flew 72, until a damaged blade grounded it for good in January 2024. It also carries a tiny scrap of fabric from the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer, so the first plane and the first Martian aircraft are technically on the same team.

Perseverance also carried MOXIE, a box about the size of a car battery that sucked carbon dioxide out of Mars's air and split it apart to make oxygen. Over 16 runs between 2021 and 2023 it made 4.3 ounces of oxygen, which, by NASA's own comparison, is about what a small dog breathes in 10 hours. Sure, that sounds pathetic, however it's the first time anyone has made something humans need to survive out of another planet's air, and a much bigger version is how a crew would make oxygen to breathe and to burn as rocket fuel for the ride home. So the small dog was a big deal.

The thing is, all that hardware is mostly there to answer one question, the same one that got everybody hooked on Mars in the first place.

The machines that reached Mars

A flyby probe and a lander from NASA missions to Mars, and what the verified record says they did.

Mariner 4, a close flyby Mariner 4 passed Mars at a closest approach of 6,120 miles from the surface. It took 21 pictures plus 21 lines of a 22nd picture, and the total data returned by the mission was 5.2 million bits. The mission cost is estimated at $83.2 million.

Viking Lander 1 on the surface Viking Lander 1 set down safely at 22.483 degrees north latitude and 47.94 degrees west longitude. On July 28, 1976, the lander robot arm scooped up the first soil samples. The lander operated until Nov. 11, 1982.

The total data returned by that flyby mission was 5.2 million bits.

Was anyone ever home?

If Mars ever had life, even just microbes, then life got started twice in the same solar system. And if it happened twice right next door, it's probably happening all over the universe, which would make it the biggest discovery in human history. That's the biggest scientific reason Mars matters, and so far Mars has given us a long list of maybes and absolutely no straight answers, which is very on brand.

The Viking landers in 1976 carried experiments built to catch living microbes in Mars's soil. One of them, called Labeled Release, fed the soil a little nutrient soup laced with radioactive carbon and then watched to see if any radioactive gas came back out, the way microbes would breathe it out after a meal. It came back positive. However, another instrument on the same lander found no organic molecules in the soil at all, meaning none of the carbon-based building blocks that living things are made of, so most scientists decided the positive result came from weird chemistry in the soil instead of life. The man who designed the experiment, Gilbert Levin, insisted until he died in 2021 that they had found life. Then the perchlorates Phoenix found in 2008 offered a possible explanation for the whole mess, because perchlorate destroys organic molecules when you heat the soil to test it, so Viking might have cooked away the very evidence it was looking for.

In 1996 NASA scientists announced that a meteorite called ALH84001, a chunk of Mars blasted off by an impact millions of years ago that eventually landed in Antarctica, had tiny structures inside it that looked like fossilized bacteria. The President of the United States stood on the White House lawn and talked about it. That being said, most researchers now think those structures and that chemistry formed without any life at all, and a 2022 study found the organic material inside came from water reacting with rock.

Then there's the methane. On Earth most methane comes from living things, cows very much included. Curiosity keeps picking up faint whiffs of methane in Gale crater that rise and fall with the seasons, with the occasional spike, however ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter, which was built partly to sniff out Mars's methane from above, finds basically none of it higher up in the atmosphere. Both instruments seem to be working fine, and nobody has explained the difference. Water reacting with rock can make methane as well, so even if the methane is real, it doesn't prove anything either way.

In 2018 Curiosity confirmed organic molecules, those carbon-based building blocks, preserved in Martian rock about 3 billion years old. Sure, organic molecules can form without any life involved, but it showed that Mars is capable of keeping them safe for billions of years, so if life ever left traces, they could still be there.

The strongest hint so far came from Perseverance. In July 2024 it found a rock in an old river channel in Jezero, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, covered in little dark-ringed spots that scientists started calling leopard spots. On Earth, patterns like that, made of the same minerals, often form when microbes feed off chemical reactions in rock. In September 2025 NASA called it a potential biosignature, which is science speak for "this could have been made by something alive, but we're not betting the house on it yet," because plain chemistry without any life could still explain it. Perseverance drilled a sample and sealed it in a tube.

And that's where we're stuck. To really know, scientists need those samples back here on Earth, under instruments far too big and too delicate to fit on a rover. Perseverance has been sealing up dozens of samples and leaving them for a future mission to collect, however NASA's plan to go and get them ballooned toward 11 billion dollars, and in January 2026 Congress stopped paying for it, so NASA is hunting for a cheaper way. China says its Tianwen-3 mission will try to bring home samples of its own around 2031. So the answer to whether we're alone in the universe might be sitting in a titanium tube in a crater on Mars right now, waiting for somebody to pay for the Uber home.

Some people are done waiting on robots, though. They want to go themselves.

No Mars print yet.

NeoPrint makes custom 3D printed objects. This is what the store lists today.

NeoPrint has no Mars print or kit yet. Its store today lists 7 objects in the Moon Collection, shown as concepts, plus the Fossil Collection and a Make Your Own page. None of them is a Mars product, so there is nothing to buy for this issue.

Visit the NeoPrint store

Who's shipping us there, and why

The loudest one is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. He started SpaceX in 2002 with the stated goal of making humanity a species that lives on more than one planet, and his pitch goes like this: sooner or later something wipes out life on Earth, whether it's an asteroid, a war or something nobody's thought of yet, and a species that only lives on one planet goes down with it. A city on Mars that could survive on its own would be a backup copy of humanity, like keeping your photos in the cloud, and he's talked about eventually putting a million people there.

The ship for the job is Starship, the biggest rocket ever built, and it's designed to be fully reusable, landing and flying again like an airliner instead of being thrown away after every launch. It burns methane and liquid oxygen, and that's on purpose, because both of those can be made on Mars out of its air and its ice, which means it could fill up on Mars for the trip home. Musk had said he wanted uncrewed Starships heading to Mars in the launch window that opens at the end of 2026, however in February 2026 he put a city on the Moon first and pushed a Mars city back to five to seven years from now. His schedules have slipped plenty before, so maybe don't pack just yet.

NASA is going about it slower and more officially. Its Moon to Mars program uses the Artemis missions to the Moon as practice for living and working far from home, with a crewed landing on Mars as the goal, currently pointed at around 2040 at the earliest, and as always, the budget gets the final say. China landed its Zhurong rover on Mars in 2021 with its Tianwen-1 mission, which made China the second country ever to drive a rover there, and it has talked about sending crews in the 2030s as well. India got into orbit around Mars on its very first try in 2014, which very few space agencies can say, and the United Arab Emirates has had an orbiter circling Mars since 2021. So it's turning into a crowded neighborhood for a planet nobody lives on.

Whoever goes, however, Mars and physics set the calendar. Earth and Mars only line up for an efficient trip once every 26 months, so if you miss the window, you wait another two years. The flight itself takes around seven months, and once you're there, you usually have to sit on Mars for more than a year until the planets line up again for the ride home, so a round trip ends up taking about two and a half to three years. No rescue mission can get to you quickly either, so whatever breaks, you fix with whatever you brought, and there's no hardware store within 34 million miles.

So why bother? For Musk it's insurance for the species and, going by how he talks about it, a dream he's had his whole life. For NASA it's science, national pride and the next frontier after the Moon, and for China it's national pride and a space race. None of them are going because Mars is nice, they're going because of what Mars might be able to give us.

Four small facts about Mars.

What Mars actually offers you and me

So strip off all the hype, and here's what Mars actually has to offer.

Water, and a lot of it, frozen. Mars keeps water ice in its polar caps, and radar on ESA's Mars Express orbiter found that the ice around Mars's south pole alone would cover the entire planet about 36 feet deep if it all melted. Orbiters have also found ice buried in the middle latitudes, in places only about 3 feet under the surface, and cliffs where layers of nearly pure ice are just sitting there exposed, like a freezer someone left open. One deposit buried under a plain called Utopia Planitia holds about as much water as Lake Superior. Water means something to drink, oxygen when you split it apart, and hydrogen for fuel, which is why every serious plan to live on Mars starts with finding where the ice is.

Then there's the air. You can't breathe Mars's air, sure, however it's 95 percent carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is raw material. MOXIE already showed you can pull oxygen out of it. Mix carbon dioxide with hydrogen from Mars's water, and a century-old bit of chemistry called the Sabatier reaction turns it into methane and water. Methane plus oxygen is rocket fuel. So a ship could land on Mars and fill up there for the trip home instead of hauling its return fuel all the way from Earth, and that's what turns a one-way ticket into a round trip.

Mars is also an easier place to leave from. Mars only pulls at 38 percent of our gravity, so leaving it takes a lot less energy, and to escape Mars you need to reach about 3.1 miles per second, compared with about 7 here. In the long run that makes Mars a better launch pad than Earth for heading deeper into the solar system, starting with the asteroid belt right next door.

Then there are the answers. If those sample tubes show Mars once had life, it changes how we understand life everywhere, and even if they don't, Mars is a full record of how a planet with water and air ends up losing both, which is worth knowing when you happen to live on one.

And the big one: a second place to exist. Every person who has ever lived has lived on one planet. A settlement on Mars that could run without any help from Earth would mean a single disaster could never end all of us, and that's the real pitch. No other place in the solar system makes it as well as Mars does.

That being said, there are honest limits. Mars isn't turning into a second Earth any time soon. A NASA-funded study in 2018 worked out that if you released every bit of carbon dioxide you could get at on Mars, from the polar caps, the dust and the rocks, you'd only raise its air pressure to a few percent of ours at most. That's still too thin to breathe and too thin to keep water liquid, so Mars will be domes, suits and buried habitats for longer than anyone alive can plan for. Nobody knows yet whether people can stay healthy there for a whole lifetime, raise kids there, or make everything they need without supply ships from home. And a colony that still needs supply ships from Earth dies when Earth does, so it only becomes our backup once it can feed itself and fix itself.

So, should you and I care about Mars?

Mars doesn't care about us. It'll keep losing its air to the Sun whether or not one of us ever stands on it. It's cold, it's radioactive, its dirt is toxic, its dust gets into everything, and just getting there burns through a career's worth of radiation.

And yet Mars is the only other planet in the solar system where we have a real shot at living. It's got water in the ground, air we can turn into oxygen and fuel, and a real chance it once had life of its own, and nothing else out there offers all of that at once. So if we ever spread beyond one planet, Mars is almost certainly where it starts.

So yeah, give a damn, a measured one. Mars might be humanity's next step, or it might just be a very expensive way for billionaires to boil, however it's the best option on a very short list, and whether we ever use it is entirely up to us.

Next time, the daily updates take one piece of this and go all the way in. We'll fall through one of Mars's planet-wide dust storms, climb Olympus Mons, and meet Phobos, the moon Mars is slowly pulling down toward itself.

What stuck?

  1. Why can't liquid water stay on the surface of Mars for long?
  2. Why did Mars lose its global magnetic field?
  3. What did Johannes Kepler finally conclude after years of fighting with Mars's orbit?
  4. What were Percival Lowell's famous Martian canals, according to the issue?
  5. Why do engineers only learn how a Mars landing went after it is already over?
  6. Why does Starship burn methane and liquid oxygen?

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