From the moment as a boy I watched the Apollo 11 astronauts walk on the moon, I threw my hat into the ring of exploring space and becoming a part of our going to other planets. Little did I know how high the highs and how low the lows would be of the roller coaster that I then embarked upon. From the vantage point of Mars Desert Research Station Crew 18 in the Year of Our Lord 2003, I feel qualified to describe this particular ride and its most recent loops and twists along the way.

In 1975, I kept vigilant tabs with the status of the first Viking spacecraft to Mars launch. At the time NASA first postponed the launch, our family vacation to Disney World seemed a mere daydream. While the vacation grew nearer and nearer on the calendar, a Viking launch kept slipping further and further into the misty future. By the time we packed our bags for Florida, I had put all thoughts of Viking aside.

A few days into our Magic Kingdom indulgence, the family decided to make the trip to Cape Canaveral for my sake. En route, we discovered that Cape Canaveral was more distant from Orlando than appeared on the map. Long before Factory Butte or Badlands Labyrinth of Utah Desert would loom an ATV's waypoint in the distance, I discovered that eyes traveling across maps and vehicles traveling across time and space tell similar, but seldom identical, stories. My parents asked me to decide, on the spur of the moment, whether we should press on or turn back and make an entire day of visiting NASA the next morning, instead of only a short evening. Having dropped all thoughts of Viking from my mind, I arbitrarily elected for us to turn around and go the next day.

As we arrived at Cape Canaveral the following morning, greeting our eyes was an enormous digital clock signifying, to my shock, that Viking would launch in about three hours! Delighted by this unexpected gift from God, a very excited 12 year old sat down in the bleachers following a panoramic bus tour and watched Viking lift off and waft its Greenhabesque aromas across the Cape.

My drive to become an astronaut motivated me to achieve high marks in school. To become an astronaut, I knew that I needed a strong technical or scientific portfolio. I leaned toward biochemistry or biomedical engineering, but as chemistry became less and less appealing to me over the course of my schooling the field of engineering fell more and more into place instead. In the Fall of 1981, I enrolled in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech to study aerospace and ocean engineering.

By this time, the grandeur of becoming an astronaut stood in sharp contrast against the reality of NASA's stringent eyesight requirements for Pilot, Commander, and Mission Specialist. My eyesight was worse than 20:200. The assassination of John Lennon did not help, either. Despite the wonders of wind tunnels, design team competitions (I became senior design team leader), and a fascinating world of emergent technologies, my own human role in the vision for the first time seemed to be slipping through my fingers.

In the meantime, NASA proved itself less and less apt to inspire the kind of vision and farsighted goal-setting of John F. Kennedy with respect to exploration of the solar system. Although the reusable Space Shuttle was an important advance -- more of an advance than many experts will admit -- those in command of NASA seemed more interested in joyriding and toy rockets and less interested in going where it matters (places like Mars), with whom it matters (people).

I should clarify that I am all in favor of robots paving the way for human exploration of the solar system. I am firmly against robots becoming the be- all and end-all of space exploration, especially where humans can indeed trod.

With a baccalaureate under my belt, I became a contractor for the military at the Naval Air Test Center in Pax River. Through the rest of the 1980's, I helped test pilots conduct flight tests of some of the world's most sophisticated technology. But I was less than a "happy camper." In 1990, I landed what I considered a dream job: planning for the accommodation of scientific payloads aboard the Space Station. Heading the entire contractor and subcontractor team was Tom Kelly, the person who led the team that designed the Apollo Lunar Module. My boss's boss on the team was none other than T. K. Mattingly - called Ken Mattingly in the movie Apollo Thirteen, who had flown one of the last Apollo's around the moon and later the Space Shuttle. In fact, T.K. was a general, even though he went by just plain, "T.K."

Talk was rife in Congress about cutbacks to the Space Station almost from day one, but I paid them little mind. I should have been wary, because the entire aerospace industry was entering one of its historic downturns. Entire classes of aerospace engineers, graduating from the top schools in the country, were finding jobs only at the rate of 1 in 100. And then, one day, Congress pulled the funding strings and the whole operation came crumbling down, in one layoff after another until all 600 employees were gone.

Following Christmas of 1992, I went from being a payload accommodations engineer for the Space Station to an occasional consultant, substitute teacher, UPS "runner," and dishwasher for Friendly's Restaurant.

Despite nearly losing the family house, I persevered and applied to graduate school. I knew that my dream of helping find extremophile life on Mars did not have to die. So I enrolled in the School of Public Health in Columbia, SC, to pursue a Masters of Science in Biostatistics. I had been delayed, but not foiled.

While in graduate school, the original technique of "radial keratotomy" to correct myopia such as I had, preventing me from a career as an astronaut, was superseded by a newer, safer, less invasive, and more corrective technique of "laser surgery." At first, the military balked at letting its personnel undertake this surgery. Later, it tentatively explored whether soldiers could have it on a trial basis in a limited number of cases. In more recent years, it has gone almost to the opposite extreme of urging certain critical personnel to have it done. More gradually, military pilots started to be allowed to have the surgery.

To me, these developments were quite fascinating. The entire basis for NASA's medical qualifications had always been military pilot medical qualifications. Now those very standards were being re-drafted due to the success and reliability of laser corrective surgery. NASA is looking more and more like the stodgy old holdout, clinging to outmoded ways. Eventually it will change, and people who undertake laser surgery will qualify for astronaut candidacy.

Since the award of my masters degree, what is ironic in my case is how, now that I am on the verge of qualifying for such a dream of a lifetime, I am beginning to realize that there are other things in life more important than becoming an astronaut. Although astronauts get to travel to exotic places, to use amazing technologies, and splash across the headlines, the tasks of colonizing Mars and making fundamental changes in our civilization so that human rights from conception to natural death are respected - will likely fall on shoulders other than those of astronauts - at least as we think of astronauts at this time.

Obviously the people who escort the first settlers on Mars will be called astronauts. But the people who actually stay there, who persevere beyond the first In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) efforts, who raise their children there, and who plant the roots of an entire new civilization, will not be known as "astronauts." Nor do I believe that NASA will be the main way that settlement of Mars will happen. The bureaucracy of NASA is far too comfortable with ways that are at best half-hearted efforts at truly exploring another world.

Witness the greatest success story in the history of NASA: the Apollo program. Six separate missions successfully landed a pair of humans on the Moon over a span of four years. As Dr. Robert Zubrin is fond of saying, we are not headed to Mars for another entry in the annals of the record books. We are not headed to Mars for Apollo Program Version 2.0. Mars is a New World, just as the Americas were a New World for Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims.

Life on this New World of Mars is being prepared for, here at Mars Desert Research Station in Utah Desert. Setting foot here, and living under the Mars simulation conditions, has driven the point home for me, that there is a lot of low-tech that can take us far in the beginning stages of the New World. And low-tech does not have to mean no-tech. After all, the incinolet toilet is neither a grand new adventure in technology, nor a throwback to the bronze age. It is merely a reliable workhorse.

How will people make it to Mars on a large scale? Another amazing sign of low-tech taking over is the Space Elevator Project. In this case, to NASA's credit the space agency funded (to the tune of $400,000 if memory serves me) a project which is already reinventing how to reach orbit in a way that will cut costs by an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude.

Because carbon nanotubes are becoming easier and easier day by day to manufacture, the same engineering principles that strung up bridges across the Chesapeake Bay, the San Francisco Bay, and hundreds of other large spans throughout the world can now be employed to erect a cable stretching from a satellite in geostationary orbit to an equatorial platform in the ocean. A small ribbon of carbon nanotube is first stretched down from orbit, then crawlers bring further ribbons up, and finally an entire launch system enters production that relies on engineering principles as basic and proven as putting up a suspension bridge. Not only that, but the system will be capable of launches on a daily basis. See www.highliftsystems.com

During MDRS 18, I have participated in four EVAs. I have learned that life on Mars in this fashion will be difficult. But such is the beginning for all new worlds which have been conquered.