Mars Society Founder: Human Colonies Are Possible On Mars

LAKEWOOD, CO – Some planet-gazers in Lakewood have been looking heavenward for 20 years, since 1998, when aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin and colleagues founded The Mars Society, based in Lakewood.

Now, with Adams County's new Colorado Air and Space Port receiving FAA approval for commercial space launches this week, and Colorado School of Mines considering the launch of a space mining major, the Centennial State may be closer than ever to becoming a center for the next phase of space exploration.

Zubrin was recently interviewed by NBC about his lifelong dream of establishing a permanent settlement on Mars.

"We should settle Mars in order to establish a new branch of human civilization or several new branches of human civilization," Zubrin said this week, making the analogy of how European exploration of the New World led to new ways of thinking that improved human experience. "[Exploration and colonization of Mars] will add to the strength and vitality of human culture as a whole. If you think about the spreading of western civilization to the Americas, the establishment of societies including the one that lead to the United States ... The real value that Europe and the rest of the world got out of the United States was a new branch of human civilization that demonstrated the value of democracy and invented electricity and the steamboat and the telegraph and the light bulb, and essentially generated electrical power and airplanes and nuclear power and computers and iPhones," he said.

The Mars Society will gather next week at the Pasadena Convention Center for its 21st annual meeting.

Included among the speakers will be research scientists from California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Mars Development Engineers from SpaceX.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder has famously said he wanted to die on Mars, "but not on impact." About Musk, Zubrin said, "I can tell you why he succeeded and why [other private space programs] didn't. [Musk] didn't just throw some money at the problem and quit as soon as it got tough. He put not only his fortune but his heart, mind and his soul into it. He learned rocketry himself, and he didn't give up when his first three launches failed."

Zubrin told NBC he thought NASA and the U.S. Space Program lost their way after the breakthroughs of the 1968 lunar landing:

"I was 17 when we landed on the moon, and if anyone had told me then that I'd be 66 and we wouldn't have cities on the moon and Mars, I would have thought they were just nuts, because the vision we had of what the future was going to be certainly included human expansion into the solar system," he said. "And at the rate we were moving in the ‘60s, it certainly would have happened. But it was stopped and I don't know that I can say I accepted it," Zubrin said.

Read the total NBC interview here.

Image via Shutterstock

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