Settling on Mars
Martian settlers on a weekend excursion. Painting by Pat Rawlings, courtesy NASA.
At the September 27, 2016 meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk, CEO of Space X, first announced his bold plan to build a city on Mars. According to Mark Hopkins, economist and Chair of the Executive Committee of the National Space Society and who was present at the talk, “The vast majority of the resources of our solar system lie in space rather than on the Earth. By settling Mars and other locations in space we can overcome the resource limits of Earth leading to a hopeful, prosperous future for all of humanity.” Musk gave a significant update at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress a year later.
Musk’s historic 2016 talk can be found here.
Musk’s 2017 update can be found here.
Musk’s highly significant update on May 29, 2025 is below.
Musk’s plan is in many ways an update of the original “Mars Direct” plan of Robert Zubrin.
At the National Space Society International Space Development Conference in Anaheim, California, on April 20, 1990, Robert Zubrin brought down the house with the first public presentation of the “Mars Direct” scenario developed by Zubrin and his colleague David Baker of the Martin Marietta company. The Mars Direct scenario held potential of lowering costs and of bringing the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet into the realm of feasibility.
The Mars Direct scenario lowered cost in two key ways: (1) by extensively relying whenever possible on in situ (on site) resource utilization (ISRU), such as the automated manufacture of return fuel from the Martian atmosphere before the first humans even leave for Mars; and (2) by launching directly from Earth, making it unnecessary to first develop an infrastructure in Earth orbit or on the Moon (the hardware developed for Mars Direct could also be used on the Moon, however). [Musk updated this by using reusable rockets and spacecraft.]
Zubrin describes his ideas quite effectively in the following three articles he wrote for the NSS magazine, Ad Astra:
