"The time has come for humanity to journey to Mars.

We're ready. Though Mars is distant, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to travel to the Moon at the commencement of the space age. Given the will, we could have our first teams on Mars within a decade.

The reasons for going to Mars are powerful..."

-- from the Founding Declaration of the Mars Society

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Overview

The Mars Society was founded in 1998 at a convention in Boulder, Colorado. There are over 3,500 dues-paying members and over 50,000 members subscribed to the Society's email action list. Members of the Mars Society include Hollywood director James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator 1 & 2, True Lies, the Abyss, and 2 upcoming Mars projects), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the Moon), actor Bruce Boxleitner (Captain Sheridan from TV's Babylon 5), and many researchers, educators, astronauts, businesspeople, professionals, students, families, and space activists around the world. The Mars Society website receives tens of thousands of page views per day and was recently named as a mirror site for the Mars Polar Lander mission. The annual Mars Society conference is held every year and is regularly attended by around 1,000 Mars enthusiasts.

The Mars Society's major project is its Mars Analog Research Program, operated in cooperation with NASA, the governments of the U.S. and Canada, the U.S. Air Force, and other organizations. The first Mars analog facility built was the Mars Arctic Research Station located on Devon Island in arctic Canada. The second was the Mars Desert Research Station in the desert of Utah in the United States. Additional bases are being planned for Northern Europe and Australia.

The Mars Society is headed by Dr. Robert Zubrin, one of the world's leading researchers on space exploration and the settlement of Mars. While working for Lockheed Martin, Zubrin designed the mission plan known as Mars Direct which cut the costs of a traditional human mission to Mars by a factor of 10 and made the idea much more feasible. Most of the elements of the Mars Direct plan have since been adopted by NASA in their design reference missions. Zubrin now heads independent R&D firm Pioneer Astronautics and serves as President of the Mars Society.

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The Mars Underground: Roots of the Mars Society
The roots of the Mars Society lie in the Mars Underground, a movement founded in the early 80s by grad students Chris McKay, Carol Stoker, and Robert Zubrin (all are now Mars Society leaders) and others at the University of Colorado at Boulder and elsewhere. They organized the first Case for Mars Conference which gathered and presented the leading Mars research of the time. The movement grew within the University and elsewhere, including NASA, and three more Case for Mars conferences followed over the next 10 years.

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The Mars Society Today
The international Mars Society now encompasses over dozens of semi-independent "chapters" around the world.

The Mars Society has been highlighted by the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, NBC, and dozens of other television, newspapers, and radio programs. Dr. Zubrin recently testified before the U.S. Senate, and was also asked to brief many congressmen privately about Mars Direct.