The Case for Mars – The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner; Free Press – an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, New York; $16.99 (paperback); 2011.
This is a revised and updated issue of the seminal Mars book on human space travel to the red planet – a volume first issued some 15 years ago. It remains a grand read – but also counts as a place marker for a future now on hold.
You’ll find a provocative plea here for humanity to step out…and onto Mars.
Given the 15 years that have passed since this book’s initial printing, the “get to know the red planet” forages by robotic craft have helped nail down what makes Mars so inexplicitly fascinating.
The author maintains that NASA is much better prepared to dispatch humans to Mars today than when the country hurled humans to the Moon in 1969.
Zubrin’s Mars prognosis is that many a naysayer is wrong – near-term human Mars exploration is within the technologies that we possess today.
“The human exploration of Mars is not a task for some future generation. It is a task for ours,” Zubrin writes in a preface to the revised edition. “We hold it in our power to begin the world anew. Let’s do it,” he explains.
Overall, America’s space program needs to move beyond square one, Zubrin explains while offering a compelling case for opening the Martian frontier for the human future.
Moreover, given the will, human footprints on the red planet could be planted by decade’s end. But will we embrace the challenge, Zubrin questions.
Given the departure to Mars of NASA’s Curiosity mega-rover later this year, readers will gain added insight as to why robotic explorers are setting the stage for human explorers to reach for the red planet.
“And just as the New World entranced and enticed mariners here on Earth,” Zubrin writes, “so can Mars entice a new generation of voyagers, a generation ready to fashion the ships and sails proper for heavenly air.”
This well-written and provocative book by Zubrin and colleague Richard Wagner will help transform your view of why Mars, and settling that distant world, is essential to not only reviving the spirit of exploration, but saving civilization from a stay at home, one-world mindset.
For more on this book, go to:
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Case-for-Mars/Richard-Wagner/9781451608113
By Leonard David