The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must

The Case for Mars makes living in space seem more possible than ever in this updated 25th anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Elon Musk. Since the beginning of human history, Mars has been an alluring dream--the stuff of legends, gods, and mystery. The planet most like ours, it had long been thought impossible to reach, let alone explore and inhabit. But that is changing fast. In February 2021, the American rover Perseverance will touch down on Mars. Equipped with a powerful suite of scientific instruments--including some that will attempt to make oxygen from the Martian atmosphere--the rover also carries a helicopter that will take spectacular panoramic movies from the air. Most exciting of all, a spectrometer onboard may find evidence of fossils left behind by microbes millions of years ago, when the planet was warm and wet, proving at last that life on Earth is not unique, but a general phenomenon in the universe. Meanwhile, in Boca Chica, Texas, Elon Musk's SpaceX has