”Our first year in the Arctic, it was all crackers,” Zubrin recalls. On later visits, they brought along a lightweight electric bread maker and began serving bread, pasta, and rice. The addition of a few simple cooked items, he says, was a huge boost to the crew’s morale. The crew ate together and took turns preparing meals. ”We’d have contests over who could cook the best meals with limited ingredients,” Zubrin says.
Growing food on Mars would cut down on payload weight and give astronauts a chance to munch on fresh produce. Lettuce and tomatoes, for instance, could be grown hydroponically in a greenhouse. Soybeans, wheat, peanuts, and other dried beans could be used to make pasta, bread, and cereal. But cultivating a garden, grinding flour, and cooking from scratch would all divert efforts from life-sustaining chores like finding water and repairing equipment. Salad or survival: The choice is pretty clear.
So, yes, Mars is hard. Wernher von Braun knew it, and yet the planet remained ever in his sights. In his novel, he included a 62-page scientific appendix dense with tables of rocketry data, landing maneuver calculations, and hand-drawn diagrams. Getting to Mars, to von Braun, was not some fantastic dream; it was a workable, solvable problem and an engineering challenge of the best kind, because it inspires us, builds us up, and unites us as a society. He saw his book not so much as a work of fiction but as a practical guide, a road map, a way forward.
”It is the vision of tomorrow which breeds the power of action,” he wrote in the novel’s preface. ”Thousands of scientists and engineers are laboring constantly to perfect our knowledge of rocketry and rocket propulsion, and millions of dollars are spent yearly to advance such research. What the results will be is beyond the public ken, but they will surely exert a vital influence upon the future of the entire Earth and well beyond its present confines.”
”When referring to technological advances,” he added, ”the word ’impossible’ must be used, if at all, with utmost caution.”
For more articles, go to Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?
About the Authors
Fred Guterl grew up building spaceships in his garage out of plywood and two by fours. He's now the assistant managing editor of Newsweek International . Monica Heger, a science writer in New York City, came of age in a post-Apollo world and never thought much about space exploration. So she was surprised to learn of all the ongoing research on manned spaceflight.
