The Mars Society is the world's largest and most influential space advocacy organization dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars. We are pioneering the goal that human beings will someday live and work on the red planet and build a thriving technical civilization that will contribute meaningfully to the human race, by settling a second home planet. This is not science fiction or fantasy. The Society is a worldwide movement with thousands of people contributing seriously towards this goal. I personally see this as not only the greatest technical challenge of our time worth pursuing but also the one that would have the most benefit for humanity long-term.

Because human beings are not (yet) living and working on Mars, we do the next-best thing - we work toward that goal with research, advocacy, and public outreach activities. Our largest and most prominent project is a program of Mars analog (or simulated) bases, the first built in 2001, Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station near the North Pole, and the most popular being the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. I served on Crew 197 at the station, and there have now been 220 different crews at the station, compromising over a thousand individual crew members. This program researches the human factors of sending people to Mars and having them work together effectively on the red planet, where you have to put on a spacesuit to go outside, and you are living with a group of people together in close quarters and having to get along and accomplish tasks together.

We also work on other projects such as the University Rover Challenge which pits Mars rovers built by student teams against each other in a competition each spring at the Mars Desert Research Station. This competition has been so successful, it has spawned other similar competitions in Europe, India, Canada, the UK and Bangladesh!

Another project is Marspedia, an online encyclopedia which is a public domain resource covering all aspects of present and future Mars activities. Additionally, different "Chapters" of the Mars Society, across the United States and the rest of the world, will work on their own projects. For example, the Northern California chapter created and refurbishes the analog space suits used at our analog research stations, and they do a fantastic job! The Mars Society also has a series of educational and public outreach initiatives, such as our annual conferences which gather together hundreds of Mars experts and enthusiasts to network and give presentations. Hundreds of those presentations are available on our YouTube channel.





The Founding of The Mars Society

At our first conference in 1998 in Boulder, Colorado, the attendees adopted a Founding Declaration that elucidates the creed and the vision of what we are working towards. These powerful words were signed by over 700 attendees at the conference, and many others later.

Here's part of the Founding Declaration: "Mars is not just a scientific curiosity; it is a world with a surface area equal to all the continents of Earth combined, possessing all the elements that are needed to support not only life, but technological society... We must go to Mars to make that potential a reality. We must go, not for us, but for a people who are yet to be. We must do it for the Martians."

The Mars Society grew out of the "Mars Underground" movement among space professionals in the early and mid 1980s. At the time, the space community in the United States discouraged work on sending humans to Mars because it was perceived to be too expensive and too far in the future, and thus a waste of time. At a series of conferences called "Case for Mars I-VI", researchers, scientists and enthusiasts discussed what research and advocacy needed to be done. One man who attended those conferences was Dr. Robert Zubrin, then a young graduate student studying nuclear physics. The conferences made a considerable impression on him, and he later wrote a book that he titled "The Case for Mars" (as a nod to the conferences) and which became an international best-seller.

Dr. Zubrin later became very prominent in the space community when, working at an aerospace company, he designed the Mars Direct plan, a cost-effective and innovative way for the first human mission to Mars to be accomplished with existing technology similar to the technology developed in the 1960s that got us to the Moon. Zubrin campaigned for Mars Direct throughout the 1990s (once even appearing on TV with Newt Gingrich), and the plan was eventually adopted by NASA as its official Mars reference mission. Yet, the funding for actually doing the plan was not forthcoming.

Frustrated by the lack of progress by traditional institutions towards advancing the goal of humans to Mars, and mindful of the widespread public support that his ideas were receiving, Zubrin founded The Mars Society to focus the effort and galvanize further support. At the very first Mars Society convention in August 1998, he got up on stage in the ballroom at the University of Colorado Boulder and said to the hundreds of attendees that had made the trek from all over the world, "I'm Robert Zubrin and am I glad to see you!"





My Own Path to The Mars Society

In December 1997, I had just graduated college and my wife and I (and our dog and our cat) began a long trek from Florida to Washington State, where I was to start a new job at Microsoft. We elected to drive to Washington instead of flying, mostly for the adventure of visiting places across the United States. As we weaved our way through the southeast, then the southwest and up the west coast of California and Oregon, I read the book "The Case for Mars" from cover to cover.

It was a prescient experience for me. As long as I have been alive, I had always been interested in space and technology, and the challenge of sending people to Mars was something I knew I wanted see happen in my lifetime, and now I had the ability to work on it myself! Soon after, I learned over the Internet about the forming of the Mars Society and the activities they would be undertaking. I jumped in with both feet.

I attended the early conventions at Boulder, Stanford, and Toronto, and began volunteering my technical skills as a software developer, website designer, and engineering project manager. The picture to the right is me giving a session track presentation at the 1999 conference which I titled "How the Mars Society can become an Internet Superpower." Soon after this, I was asked to work on the Society's first electronic magazine, Ares, and helped get the first project and chapter websites up and running.

Much later, in 2011, I was tapped by Dr. Robert Zubrin to be the Information Technology (IT) Director and primary website administrator for the Mars Society. Since then I have worked with volunteers and our other staff members to modernize and expand our online presence into what it is today. We have tens of thousands of Facebook followers, YouTube subscribers, and visitors to our website. We also have several project and chapter websites that I help support, such as the Marspedia online encyclopedia mentioned earlier.





Enter MarsVR - Using Virtual Reality to Explore Mars

In 2018, I had the opportunity to visit and tour NASA's center for Mars research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The scientists there showed me where they design and work on the rover missions that are exploring Mars right now. They also showed me how they use virtual reality to decide where to send the Curiosity rover and what rocks to drill. In the Ops Lab at JPL, I put on a Microsoft Hololens headset and was immediately transported to the red planet, to the exact spot where the rover was that day. I looked around and off into the distance, and got very excited. I took off the headset and thought to myself "Everybody should get to see this. This should be in museums and schools across the country and the world." I believed then and now that the experience of putting on a VR headset and walking around on Mars is something that most people will never forget, and it can touch their lives deeply. It sure did for me.

When I got back to Seattle, I began talking to people and researching how the Mars Society might create a similar experience. Dr. Zubrin had the idea of centering it on our Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, where the terrain is very Mars-like and the VR application could also serve the additional purpose of helping to train the crew members, at home and before they reach the station. I thought it was a fantastic idea and got to work.

We created a Kickstarter campaign and raised $31,000 for the development of a MarsVR application, which we call Phase 1. We used the funds to scan the terrain around the MDRS with a fixed-wing drone, and using the latest techniques of photogrammetry to photograph and measure the interiors of the buildings so that we could create a life-like version in VR. The end result is very good but not yet ready for the general public, as we need to do some cleanup and augmentation of the experience. Still, I have shown the application to many people at events, and the reception is universally positive. Last year at an event, I showed it to a few hundred underprivileged middle school girls in Seattle. It was a rewarding experience for me and I could clearly see that it had an impact on many of them.

This year, in 2020, I will be helping to organize a series of demonstrations of MarsVR at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, as part of Yuri's Night, held every April 12th as a worldwide celebration of the first man in space.

Now, two and a half years after my visit to the JPL Ops Lab, MarsVR is a robust and long-term project driven by volunteers and we are working towards our first public release later this year. Eventually, we'd like to have several places on Mars included, such as facilities similar to the winning designs for the Mars Colony Design Contest held in 2019. That is part of the Phase 2 work that is just getting started now.

So, Why Should I Join?

The Mars Society is open to people in all countries, of all backgrounds, of all levels of education, of all skill sets, and of all views. I tell people over and over again: we don’t agree on everything, and that’s good! Our diversity of opinions is just as important as our diversity of everything else.

Here are some reasons for you to join the Mars Society:

You can volunteer for a worthwhile cause.

You get to meet interesting people from all around the world, of all backgrounds.

You can learn new skills by helping with our projects and outreach activities.

You can bring your own passion and experience to our movement and enrich it in your own way.

You get to brag to other people that you are part of a worthwhile cause.

You can help the human race settle another world.

So, if you have a passion for Mars and space, join us for the adventure of a lifetime!





Further Resources





James Burk is the IT Director of the Mars Society and an organizer of the Seattle chapter. He is the Senior Manager of Business Management Services at Artic Consulting. He holds a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). Formerly with Microsoft, James has worked as an engineering project manager and software developer for over twenty years.