By Jacob Mikanowski, The Economist, October 9, 2026
The International Space Development Conference (ISDC) is an annual jamboree for interplanetary entrepreneurs. It draws space-industry professionals, NASA researchers, rocket-launch obsessives, young dreamers and anyone else hoping one day to live in—or at least profit from—settlements beyond Earth.
Last year it took place in Orlando, Florida, in a convention centre sandwiched between Sea World and the Universal theme park. Crowds flocked around vendors peddling dehydrated “space salsa” and guided tours of Florida’s “Space Coast”, the stretch of shoreline that includes Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Centre. An astronaut signed copies of his children’s book.
At one table sat Robert Zubrin, the man who has for more than three decades been one of the most forceful proponents for colonising Mars. Zubrin, then 73, in a rumpled jacket and his signature black cap, was there to sign copies of his latest book, “The New World on Mars”. But his stall wasn’t getting much footfall, save for a retired NASA engineer who wanted to shoot the breeze about Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s rival spacecraft and the “race with the Chinese to build a base on the Moon”.
Despite having no official position in the vast federal bureaucracy that oversees America’s space programme, and little of the public profile of the billionaires now driving the new space race, Zubrin could be considered the intellectual architect of the next great push into the solar system. In a series of books over the past three decades, he has laid out what many in the space industry regard as one of the most compelling visions for sending humans to the Red Planet.
Zubrin is an engineer by training and it shows: his prose is dense with technical minutiae, from the precise mass-to-thrust ratios of different rocket-fuel mixtures to the velocity changes required to escape the gravitational pull of asteroids and planets. But his books are also infused with a broader philosophy: that settling Mars is essential to human progress. Want to supercharge technological innovation? Save democracy? End war? Zubrin’s answer, in one form or another, is to go to Mars.
Want to supercharge technological innovation? Save democracy? End war? Zubrin’s answer, in one form or another, is to go to Mars
Although Zubrin and Musk want to get to the same destination, they disagree over who should be in the cockpit. Zubrin acknowledges that much of the recent progress in spaceflight has come from the private sector, but believes that a mission to Mars should be led by the government, with entrepreneurs like Musk competing to make it happen. Despite his ambivalence towards NASA, which he sees as compromised by pork-barrel politics and its deference to aerospace contractors, Zubrin told me when we met at ISDC that Mars “has to be an American programme, not an Elon Musk hobbyhorse”.
Our conversation in Orlando, in June 2025, was the first of a series I had with Zubrin over the following year, during which America’s crewed spaceflight programme seemed to be in continual flux. A few months before we first met, Musk’s cost-cutting operation, the Department of Government Efficiency, had made heavy cuts to NASA’s programmes. “They’re making enemies of the space-science community,” Zubrin told me in his typically gruff, forthright manner. “And guess what people are saying…[that] we’re having our programme wrecked so that this fucking Bond villain can run off with his giant spaceship to Mars.”
Zubrin was reflexively pessimistic about the prospect of his dream being realised. In the wave of excitement that followed John F. Kennedy’s announcement of the Moon programme in 1961, the human conquest of space seemed almost inevitable. But, in Zubrin’s view, a lack of political will put paid to that. “We were going to reach the Moon by 1970, Mars by the early 1980s, and Alpha Centauri [the closest star system to the Sun] by the year 2000,” he said. “Right now, we should have the first kids graduating high school on Mars.”
Yet when I spoke to him again a few months later, Zubrin sounded hopeful. Jared Isaacman, the private astronaut and entrepreneur whom Musk had backed to run NASA, had survived a falling-out between Musk and Donald Trump and was eventually confirmed as the agency’s administrator. Zubrin thought Isaacman “a good appointment”. Perhaps, after all these years, the quest for the Red Planet was back on the agenda.
Zubrin was five years old and living in Brooklyn when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957. The news shocked America and turned the space race into a national obsession. For Zubrin’s sixth birthday, his father bought him a telescope. From then on, he dreamt of living among the stars.
While waiting for humanity to expand across the solar system, Zubrin channelled his energies into chess, becoming a teenage prodigy. In 1969 he watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing from Leningrad, where he was competing in an international chess tournament. As Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing craft, it was clear America had won. “All the Russians I knew were just amazed and thrilled,” recalled Zubrin. “How did you do this? How is this possible? It made a point. This is something free people can do.”
“People are saying we’re having our programme wrecked so that this fucking Bond villain can run off with his giant spaceship to Mars”
The politics of the cold war were never far from the Zubrin family dinner table. His father, descended from Russian Jews, was a centrist; his mother, from a Hungarian Jewish family, had been a communist. She belonged to the party until 1939, when she quit over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, whereby Stalin and Hitler agreed to carve up eastern Europe. But she remained a left-wing activist. Zubrin himself joined the anti-Vietnam-war movement as a student, before swinging rightward during the Reagan years.
Zubrin studied maths at the University of Rochester, then pursued graduate studies in nuclear engineering and aeronautics at the University of Washington. The early 1980s were an exciting time to be an engineer. Scientists were searching for alternatives to fossil fuels, spurred on by the energy crisis of the previous decade. Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the Sun, seemed especially promising. An act of Congress in 1980 committed America to trying to demonstrate the viability of nuclear fusion by the early 1990s.
Zubrin spent the summer of 1985 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, helping to develop spherical fusion reactors, a potentially more efficient alternative to the conventional doughnut-shaped tokamak. He remembers being captivated by the work: “Fusion was another open frontier, limitless energy. In grad school, I thought nuclear fusion would be the greatest thing to happen in my working life.” But Zubrin soon became frustrated with the lack of progress in the field. In his view, this was partly a consequence of the consolidation of international research programmes, which reduced competition between the scientists investigating different approaches.
He found his attention increasingly drawn to another frontier. In 1981 a group of space scientists had begun holding conferences in Boulder, Colorado, called “The Case for Mars”. Their aim was to rekindle public and scientific interest in the Red Planet, which had waned since 1976, when two robotic missions, both part of the Viking programme, found no clear evidence of life there. Zubrin attended the third conference, in 1987, which attracted more than 1,000 participants and featured speakers including Carl Sagan, a celebrity astronomer, and James Fletcher, the former head of NASA.
Zubrin was energised by the conference, deciding that working on Mars exploration would offer “much more creative freedom” than he had encountered in his career to date. He handed his resumé to Ben Clark, a manager at Martin Marietta, the aerospace company that had made the Viking spacecraft.
A year later, Zubrin had a job at Martin Marietta, working on the design of interplanetary missions. The company (which later merged with its competitor, Lockheed, to form Lockheed Martin) was based in Colorado, and Zubrin moved with his wife, Hope, a science teacher, to a house in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Their daughter, Rachel, was born in 1992.
When he wasn’t plugging away at his day job, Zubrin devoured books about the history of his adopted town, Golden, named after Thomas Golden, an aptly named 19th-century prospector. A title that made a particular impression was “The Great Frontier” by Walter Prescott Webb, published in 1952. Webb, an American historian, built on the “frontier thesis” put forward by another American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893. Turner argued that the experience of settling America’s wild frontier fostered a distinctive culture of individualism, self-reliance and egalitarianism. Webb built on the idea, arguing that the discovery of the Americas had transformed Western civilisation by giving Europeans access to vast quantities of land and natural resources. The resulting economic boom, he believed, developed capitalism and “mothered” democracy.
For much of the 20th century, the “frontier thesis” shaped how Americans were taught about their country’s history. But Turner’s ideas gradually fell out of favour, as historians emphasised the violence inflicted on indigenous Americans and the substantial role played by the federal government in the American West, from army forts to prolonged military campaigns.
When Zubrin spoke to me over Zoom from his home in Colorado this August, he quoted Webb’s prediction that “people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express.” Webb imagined a “frontierless world” sliding into authoritarianism and economic stagnation, its people retreating into “the harmless nuances of the known” rather than the “thundering uncertainties” of unexplored seas and continents. He also dreamed of the sudden discovery of a new planet, close enough to Earth to provide room for settlement and exploration.
“Every feature of frontier American life that acted to create a practical can-do culture of innovative people will apply to Mars one hundredfold”
Zubrin was determined to turn Webb’s vision of a new frontier into reality, as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In 1989 NASA estimated that a programme to set up a permanent moon base and eventually send humans to Mars would cost roughly $500bn. Zubrin and fellow Martin Marietta engineer David Baker devised what they called “Mars Direct”: skip the space stations and lunar pitstops imagined by NASA and fly straight to Mars. Once there, the settlers would live off the land, extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen from the atmosphere to manufacture fuel for the return journey. That meant carrying far less from Earth—and, Zubrin argued, spending far less to get there.
Zubrin put the price of his plan at $20bn, largely by stripping away what he saw as the agency’s “grandiose” design and bureaucratic “obtuseness”. His scheme, as it evolved over the years, aspired to be practical: make breathable air, drinkable water and building materials from Martian resources using technologies already proved on Earth, rather than waiting for some technological breakthrough.
In 1990 he presented Mars Direct at the fourth Case for Mars conference. A Boston Globe reporter picked up the story, describing it as a plan that “would shave 20 years off President Bush’s timetable and save up to $300bn in the process”, which led to further press coverage. Zubrin was becoming a public face of Mars exploration.
Over the next two years, he took Mars Direct on the road, recruiting influential allies. Mike Griffin, who oversaw exploration at NASA, backed the plan and helped Zubrin present a fuller version to engineers at Johnson Space Centre in 1992. They thought it too risky, particularly its reliance on making fuel on Mars, and proposed a compromise: Mars Semi-Direct, which an internal study estimated would cost $55bn. But the mission, led by an engineer called David Weaver, soon disappeared into NASA’s bureaucratic maze. As Zubrin later put it, Weaver found himself “trying to herd cats”.
Rather than wait for NASA to come around, Zubrin decided to win over the public. In 1996 he published “The Case for Mars”, arguing that a new civilisation on Mars could usher in an era of technological progress and personal liberty, much as the American frontier had done two centuries earlier.
The planet’s harshness would reward self-reliance and ingenuity: “every feature of frontier American life that acted to create a practical can-do culture of innovative people will apply to Mars one hundredfold.” He imagined “a frontier society based on technological excellence and pragmatism”, populated by people “self-selected for personal drive”. Mars would become “a hotbed of invention”, producing technologies that would eventually benefit Earth, too.
Zubrin also saw Mars as a way to ease conflict on Earth. Its vast expanses of land, he believed, could loosen humanity’s grip on the idea that resources are finite. He regarded this belief as one of the great dangers of a closed world. In “The Case for Mars”, he argues that Malthusianism—the idea, now widely discredited, that population growth tends to outstrip the supply of food—turns people and nations into competitors for a dwindling supply of resources. “Only in a universe of unlimited resources”, he writes, “can all men be brothers.”
The Case for Mars” became a surprise bestseller, winning praise from Sagan and Buzz Aldrin. The year it was published, Zubrin left Lockheed Martin to found Pioneer Astronautics, a company devoted to turning his ideas into workable technology. The research stations he set up in 2001, both of which are still in use, became a way to test what living on the planet might actually entail. Researchers spend weeks in the cylindrical structures, which look like oversized tuna cans, living as they would on Mars: wearing spacesuits outside, remembering to open and close airlocks when they leave their habitats, and communicating by radio (messages from “Earth” arrive with a 20-minute delay).
Zubrin wanted to build a movement as well as machines. His relentless promotion of Mars Direct won him some supporters within NASA. Jim Garvin, who served as the agency’s chief scientist for Mars exploration, consulted Zubrin during planning sessions in 1999 and 2000. He told me Zubrin was a “catalyst” who helped push the agency towards more ambitious scientific goals.
Zubrin sees Musk as a hero in the “Homeric sense, like Achilles”: grand, but deeply flawed
In the years since, Zubrin has testified before Congress about the future of space travel and continued to lobby NASA. His ideas have been radical: scrap the space-shuttle programme, move away from the International Space Station and redirect the savings towards the “heavy lift booster”—a rocket powerful enough to transport large payloads into space.
There has been little official enthusiasm for his approach. Todd Harrison, who researches space policy at American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, told me Zubrin’s plans were too far removed from NASA’s day-to-day reality to have much impact at an agency that “operates on annual budgets”. “Any kind of vision that extends more than two presidential terms into the future is just not useful for NASA,” he said.
But Musk may already have built the rocket of Zubrin’s dreams. SpaceX’s Starship is designed to carry roughly as much as the Saturn V, which sent the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Unlike the Saturn V, however, it is intended to be fully reusable, like an aeroplane. Zubrin believes it could make a Mars Direct-style mission dramatically cheaper. He also thinks used Starships could one day carry ordinary people to Mars. With room for up to 100 people, they could become the workhorses of Martian settlement, carrying passengers at the cost of $20,000 each.
Starship has suffered multiple failures in test flights. But on its 14th launch, on September 28th, it reached orbit for the first time. This achievement puts Zubrin in an awkward position: the success of his vision depends on a man whose worldview is starkly different from his own. Zubrin sees Musk as a hero in the “Homeric sense, like Achilles”: grand, but deeply flawed. Musk is “not about money”, he told me in Orlando, but “about kleos”—an Ancient Greek concept that Zubrin translates as “eternal glory for doing great things”. He thinks this is the root of Musk’s achievements, but that it also has “a pathological side to it”, making him “extremely arrogant” and hungry for recognition.
Yet Zubrin is convinced that Musk’s ventures are vital for the future of Mars settlement. When we met in Colorado last August, he said that although Musk’s politics were “extremely questionable” and that they were “180 degrees apart on Ukraine”, his “entrepreneurial abilities are enormous. And they are what make him an asset to the human race…A terrific asset.”
Away from Mars, Zubrin has found plenty of other causes to champion, some more eccentric than others. He has long been interested in alternatives to fossil fuels. In “Energy Victory”, published in 2007, he argued that America could reduce its dependence on oil by switching to alcohol-based fuels such as ethanol and methanol. His 2023 book “The Case for Nukes” defends nuclear power as a source of cheap, plentiful energy, both on Earth and in space.
Zubrin is far from your average environmentalist. In “Merchants of Despair”, published in 2011, he rails against the green movement’s hostility to technological progress, tracing what he sees as links between modern environmentalism, eugenics and the Nazis.
His bibliography ranges further still: a historical novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, billed as a translation of a lost text by the 12th-century poet Marie de France; a five-act play about Benedict Arnold, the American revolutionary-war general who betrayed his country; and “First Landing”, a goofily entertaining sci-fi novel about the first human mission to Mars, which is almost derailed by incompetent bureaucrats and “eco-goth” hackers.
What these disparate projects have in common—some of them at least—is the idea that progress is being thwarted by the people meant to enable it. And just as Webb imagined a new planet arriving to shake America out of its stagnation, Zubrin looks to Mars as an escape from the constraints of life on Earth.
When he was 17, home from school with a cold, Zubrin invented a three-player version of chess, which he later patented and sold to a toy company. It is played on a 96-cell board resembling three converging arrowheads. When one player defeats another, they take over their opponent’s pieces and turn them against the remaining player. The result is a game of shifting alliances, in which the balance of power can change abruptly.
A similarly unstable contest is developing in space, as America, China and Russia jockey for strategic advantage. Modern warfare increasingly depends on satellites for imagery, communications and navigation, as the war in Ukraine has shown.
He summed up his philosophy in a line: “Freedom will give us space, space will give us freedom”
“This is the first space war,” Zubrin told me in August 2025 over coffee at the Bridgewater Grill in Golden, the Rocky Mountains towering above us and a rain-swollen creek raging below. He had recently returned from three weeks in Ukraine, where he had been helping to extend the range of its drones. It was the latest of several trips he had made there since the war began.
Ukraine has drawn on a vast stream of satellite intelligence from America and Europe, giving its forces a detailed picture of Russian troop movements and positions. Russia has its own satellites, but has struggled to turn the information they provide into intelligence that can be used on the battlefield.
“The reason that Ukraine can fight Russia despite being outnumbered four to one [in population terms] is space reconnaissance,” he told me six months before Trump began his war with Iran. “What this war really shows is that in future conflict, whoever has space superiority will win.”
Zubrin believes that the ability to launch satellites into orbit will be as vital to winning future wars as air superiority has been to past conflicts. He is watching the narrowing gap between America and China in space technology with alarm. SpaceX’s Falcon 9, a partly reusable rocket, has made it cheaper and easier to launch satellites at scale. Chinese companies are now developing their own similar rockets in an effort to close the gap.
But Zubrin is also pinning his hopes on space settlement to ease competition between the major powers. Despite the historical evidence that territorial expansion can fuel conflict, he remains convinced that colonising Mars could reduce the incentives for war on Earth. “If you open new planets, why fight over provinces?” is one of his favourite lines. When we first met, he put it more colourfully: “If we are rats in a cage, we are doomed to fight it out for the scraps. Every nation is the enemy of every other nation. Every person is the enemy of every other one.”
Zubrin also believes that the space race will favour the freest societies, just as it did in 1969. “Whenever a more challenging environment has opened,” he told me, the most successful nations have been “the most liberal”—giving the Dutch Republic’s and Britain’s naval prowess as examples. He sees America’s free economy as a crucial advantage in the new space race, allowing people like Musk to spearhead an “entrepreneurial space revolution”.
Russia, by contrast, “has people interested in space, and large amounts of capital. But anything profitable will get stolen” by those in power. Zubrin worries that something similar is happening in America, as “constitutional government and the rule of law” come under attack from the Trump administration. A former Republican, he left the party after Trump’s nomination in 2016. He sees the current administration as not just a domestic disaster but a threat to global trade and democracy.
There’s hope at the end of the telescope though: on Mars, economic and political liberalism will go hand in hand. “Those Martian settlements that create free institutions will outgrow others,” Zubrin told me. “In science fiction, there used to be a standard plot in which someone establishes a planetary tyranny. But realistically, extraterrestrial tyrannies will die on the vine, because no one will want to emigrate to them.” He summed up his philosophy in a line: “Freedom will give us space, space will give us freedom.”
Not everyone buys Zubrin’s vision of a peaceful Martian utopia. Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist, argues that Mars could create new opportunities for abuses of power rather than fostering freedom. In her book “Off-Earth”, she warns that the limited resources available to colonists “down to the air they breathe—will be controlled by a handful of people, opening the population up to terrifying new methods of tyrannical behaviour.”
“If we are rats in a cage, we are doomed to fight it out for the scraps. Every nation is the enemy of every other nation. Every person is the enemy of every other one”
Daniel Deudney, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has also written about the risks of interplanetary settlement. Once Mars becomes economically self-sufficient, Deudney thinks that the “pressures for that colony to become independent would be overwhelming” and lead to “interstate anarchy on a solar-system scale”. In time, he predicts, Mars and Earth will inevitably grow apart, perhaps even on the “species” level, generating a “potential for violence hard to imagine for Terrans”.
Zubrin doesn’t take kindly to those who doubt his arguments. At ISDC in Orlando he berated a speaker for suggesting that the warping effects of cosmic rays on the human brain might raise the risk of suicide. “If you drink a hundred glasses of red wine, it will kill you,” he shouted from the audience. “But that doesn’t mean that drinking one glass a night for a hundred nights will.”
Zach Weinersmith, a science writer, had a similar run-in with Zubrin. In their book “A City on Mars”, he and his wife, Kelly, take a sceptical view of space settlement, focusing on the health risks, uncertain economics and murky legal status of a Mars colony. Weinersmith told me that during one event Zubrin yelled at him “for ten minutes” over their assessment of radiation danger and the challenges of giving birth in space. But Weinersmith took a charitable line: “You have to be prickly to argue for something people think is nutty for 30 years.”
Last summer in the ISDC, before a small audience of space professionals and enthusiasts, Zubrin unveiled the vision for life on the Red Planet outlined in his new book. He imagines a network of small cities, each home to some 50,000 people, around the size of early-Renaissance Florence. To shield their inhabitants from harmful radiation, these settlements would be at least partially underground—built in giant lava tubes, between the walls of meteor craters or in hollowed-out hillsides.
Zubrin is particularly keen on the idea of building cities underneath artificial lakes in craters. (There isn’t any liquid water on Mars, but it could be melted out of the Martian permafrost by nuclear reactors.) The lake would be a radiation shield and a breeding pool for edible fish, letting Martians look at the stars and twin moons through a ceiling of tilapia.
Although there is a libertarian streak to Zubrin’s blueprint for a Red Frontier, free from the shackles of Earth-based rules and regulations, some of his ideas sound positively European. Rather than mining settlements or suburban sprawl, Zubrin dreams of small, walkable towns where most people get around by bicycle or public transport. Cars, when needed, will be shared—as will ovens. Zubrin foresees communal kitchens, where “you can bring your own ingredients, cook what you like, and then either eat it there or take it home for a private meal.”
Martian cities will be planned, but not so strictly as to stifle organic growth. Like Jane Jacobs, the great American urbanist, Zubrin favours dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods, teeming with “cafés, bakeries, peddler stalls, taverns and music schools, ready to be visited by pedestrians, cyclists or roller skaters”. He hopes these neighbourhoods will be as easy on the eye as historic streets in European towns. As he explained to his audience, the first Mars bases might be “brutalist” in style, but the colonies that survive in the long run “will be the ones that attract the most female immigrants”. There are “lots of ways you could design a city, but you’ve got to design it to be beautiful”.
“You have to be prickly to argue for something people think is nutty for 30 years”
Each town will have its own pressurised dome full of breathable air, containing a park and event venues that will, Zubrin hopes, nurture a strong civic culture. There will be group activities such as singing and dancing, as well as plenty of sports. Zubrin thinks the low gravity on Mars could open up some intriguing possibilities for athletes. Sporting arenas could be pressurised to resemble sea-level conditions on Earth, meaning “players will be able to strap wings to their arms and fly like birds”. This could make it possible to play “spectacular sports” such as Quidditch, aerial basketball and, outside the domes, on the great Martian plains, “cross-country rover races comparable to Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race”.
Zubrin won’t be taking part, however. In “The New World on Mars” he describes himself as “an individualist who has never had much affinity for organised sports, let alone organised religion”. More to the point, he has come to realise that his dream of a human settlement on Mars is unlikely to be fulfilled in his lifetime. He knows he will probably have to shelve his plan of being buried there, or in soil from Mars “like the Marquis de Lafayette”, the Frenchman who brought back American earth for his grave after fighting against the British in the war of independence.
Zubrin’s motivation, he says, is not to fly to Mars himself, but to be remembered “as one of the people who made it happen”. Indeed, his chief accomplishment is as a sort of spiritual midwife to the private-rocketry boom, even though those rockets are a long way from colonising the solar system.
Sporting arenas could be pressurised to resemble sea-level conditions on Earth, meaning “players will be able to strap wings to their arms and fly like birds”
Zubrin hopes that once Mars is settled, its inhabitants will return to “The Case for Mars” for advice, although he thinks that by then many of his projections will seem quaint. He suspects that his plan for terraforming—making Mars more Earth-like through engineered changes to its atmosphere and ecology—will be particularly prone to error. After all, he said, he is writing with “the perspective of a 20th-century engineer, for a 23rd-century task”.
In his mind he resembles Jules Verne, who outlined a plan for space travel in his novel “From the Earth to the Moon”. The book, Zubrin told me, was wrong on a lot of counts; for one thing, Verne’s lunar travellers were propelled by a giant cannon, which couldn’t have given them enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity. But, Zubrin points out, Verne also got a lot of things right about the Moon landing: the three-person crew, a launch in Florida, a lunar orbiter. In the 24th century, Zubrin hopes Martians may pick up his book “and think, oh, what a 20th-century idea”. But still, he says, “I’d like to be the Jules Verne of Mars.”
Jacob Mikanowski is a writer based in Portland, Oregon
Photographs: Matt Nager
Illustrations: Coke Navarro
