Humanity’s Mars future envisioned in Boulder County author’s book, miniseries

Man’s future on Mars is front and center in two major media productions in coming weeks, and an award-winning Boulder-area science journalist is a central figure behind the launch of both.

Leonard David, who lives with wife, Barbara, far up Coal Creek Canyon in unincorporated Boulder County, is the author of “Mars — Our Future on the Red Planet,” to be published next month by National Geographic Books.

David, who was a longtime staff writer for Space.com — and still writes for that publication, SpaceNews and others — was most recently the co-author of “Mission to Mars” with his friend, astronaut Buzz Aldrin. His new book’s Oct. 25 release will be followed Nov. 14 by the debut of a six-part National Geographic Channel miniseries, “Mars,” which will tell the story of a fictional, inaugural crewed mission to the Red Planet in 2033, produced by Academy Award winners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

“I was talking to friend of mine at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and I said, ‘For God’s sake, do not discover life on Mars between those dates,'” David joked.

National Geographic sees the multi-platform blitz as seizing on the public interest evidenced by the runaway success of the Andy Weir novel “The Martian,” which was translated to a film of the same name in 2015 to critical acclaim and a half-billion dollars in box-office revenues.

David described himself to a recent visitor as “Nothing more than a rank amateur astronomer.”

But Boulder astronomy author Jeff Kanipe is among those who sings the praises of David and his knowledge of his subject matter.

“Leonard is very knowledgeable and can communicate on many levels, from novices to experts. He’s a space journalist to be sure — with some 50-odd years of experience — but he’s also part-scientist himself,” Kanipe said in an email.

“In the science-writing business, your knowledge base has to be as wide as the Mississippi but only a few feet deep. In Leonard’s case, though, it’s much deeper from bank to bank.”

David, whose home is situated on a property he dubs “Black Hole Way,” has staked clear claim on a place in the spotlight as the Mars projects take off in the weeks ahead.

It’s a journey the 69-year-old space writer has prepared for since he was a small boy growing up under the wide-open skies of Waco, Texas.

“Out in Texas, in Waco, it was just, look up. There’s a lot going on up there,” he recalled. “I kept breaking my glasses, making telescopes out of the broken glasses I had.”

The writing started early, too.

“As a kid, even in the late ’50s, I had my own little newspaper. I wrote it in pencil and sold it for a nickel in the neighborhood, and I wrote about space. I had my own little communiques going out about space exploration, at a time when we hadn’t even launched the first satellite.”

He was also inspired as a youth by some of the first photographs of Earth taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter camera mounted on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reproduced memorably in fold-out spreads in National Geographic — by whom he is employed more than a half-century later.

“You could see the Earth’s curvature,” David said. “Then, when Sputnik was launched, it was like, okay, the space age has really arrived. We’re really doing this now … As a kid you’re like, okay, let’s make this happen. Where’s my helmet? I’m ready to go.”

From Boulder to Mars

David is not of a generation that will live to be one of those destined to set foot on Mars.

But much of his life has been devoted to studying, reading, writing and talking about humanity’s possible journey to the fourth rock from the sun. It started in earnest after meeting a number of young University of Colorado students in the late 1970s who were attending a conference in the nation’s capitol.

Those students, working under the late Charles Barth, the pioneering director of CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, were excited about discussing the “terraforming” of Mars — essentially, making it habitable to humans.

They included Christopher McKay, now a leading planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center; Carol Stoker, now a staff planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, as well as Penelope Boston, recently selected as the new director for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.

“These were students that were like minded,” David said. “They were really interested. This was before we even had the shuttle. Chris McKay and I were in the lobby of Washington Hilton. We said, ‘We ought to do a Mars conference, and see who shows up.'”

That first session, held in CU’s Glenn Miller Ballroom in 1981, was geared to making the case for Mars — both for further robotic science spacecraft and human missions.

“Every time we finished one, we said we’d never do another one,” David said of those conferences, recalling the licking of stamps and envelopes for invitations in the pre-internet days. “We were just students. We pooled our money, and were able to buy doughnuts for the people showing up.”

Citing those conferences, David said, “The whole case for Mars was really born in Boulder.”

But as David’s new book reflects, the push toward Mars has been embraced to varying degrees by not only NASA, the European Space Agency, plus government space programs of China, Russia, Japan, India, but the private sector through the high-profile ventures of fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

In fact, Musk on Tuesday is making the keynote speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, “Making Humans A Multiplanetary Species,” in which the SpaceX CEO is expected to lay out his plan to transport humans to Mars and set up a permanent, sustainable colony.

“He wants to make it happen at a much faster pace than a NASA-government role” would make possible, David said. But, will he succeed?

“I think, if the rockets don’t explode anymore,” David said, alluding to the Sept. 1 explosion of a SpaceX rocket on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., that destroyed a $200 million satellite. “He’s got his own issues. He’s an amazing guy. I was lucky to meet him a long time ago, long before he became famous on Tesla and all the other things he’s done.”

David isn’t ready to issue a firm prediction on whether it might be government or private-sector interests that put people on Mars — although he suggested that if it’s a government effort, that would likely require multiple governments working together to make it happen.

“It could be both; I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I think I like the idea there’s options,” David said. He added, “In my career I never thought I’d be talking to billionaires about space.”

A lonely place

Getting to Mars, David believes, is only going to be half the battle — likely much less than half. But even that will be a struggle. And, while current technology makes it a trip of six to nine months, that’s going to change.

In the near future, he said, “There are people talking a week. Or, weeks. New propulsion concepts are out there, looming. There’s nothing to say that we can’t go faster,” he said. “And the way we’re doing it now, this is Wright brothers stuff. This is all bailing wire and canvas, to me.”

For the first pioneers to Mars, he said, “It will be arduous. It will be dangerous. We’ll probably lose people. But, getting to Mars, we’re going to get there faster and it won’t be as big of a deal. I don’t know what physics is going to be used, but you can see it coming in the literature. People are working on it.”

A bigger deal, perhaps, than getting there, will be settling and living in the hostile Martian environment. The challenges will be biological, physiological and even psychological.

“One of the chapters, I call ‘Marsland,” and I say that it’s remote. But when you look at (the rover) Curiosity, and some of the imagery from Mars, from the surface, I get emails from people saying, ‘This looks like someplace I’ve been. It looks desert-y. It looks like Grand Canyon. It looks like bluffs. The bad news is, it’s got a carbon dioxide atmosphere and it’s got radiation pouring down on you because of thin atmosphere. It’s not luxury-land. It’s Marsland.”

As to the psychological aspects, much has been written on the profound psychological impacts some astronauts have experienced upon seeing Earth from afar as a sparkling blue orb hanging in the space through which they’re hurtling. What about when they can’t see it at all?

“We don’t know what that break from Earth is going to do to these people psychologically,” David said. “And, talking to the psychologist Nick Kanas, the term he had was ‘Earth out of view.’

“At some point you are on Mars and the sun is between you and the Earth. The Earth is not in view. There is no way to communicate through the sun, so you’re in a unique loneliness factor, and we have never experienced that. And we don’t know what that is going to do. Maybe nothing. Maybe it will be something that will break down the crew somehow. We don’t know.”

Interplanetary homecoming?

As one approaches David’s home, in addition to the “Black Hole Way” sign, there’s the “Astronaut Crossing” sign, as well as the caution, “Alien World Ahead.”

Once inside the 3,100-square-foot tri-level home, a visitor is treated to a floor-to-ceiling collection — dominating virtually every room — of space miscellany big and small. The collection spans the curious to the treasured, ranging from a 6-foot cardboard mockup of the Saturn V rocket to a well-thumbed paperback copy of Wernher von Braun’s seminal “The Mars Project,” published in 1952, which David snatched up for all of $1.49.

Asked whether the “Alien World Ahead” sign signals a belief in extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, David doesn’t hesitate in answering in the affirmative.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in the history of this planet, we had visits,” he said. “Look at how many places we’re visiting. We just found a planet that looks pretty good, four-and-a-third light years away in Alpha Centauri.”

He warmed to the subject -— as he does with most anything relating to space exploration — and said, “I’m not so sure that we haven’t misidentified attempts (to contact Earth) that have been made in the past. There have been several instances where people couldn’t figure out exactly what a signal was.

“From a scientific point of view, it’s not so much the question, are we alone? That’s not the question anymore. It’s, how crowded is it? How many civilizations have survived their own technologies?”

In fact, man’s journey to Mars could, potentially, even represent an interplanetary homecoming, David said.

“I’ve talked to quite a few people about the ethics of changing another world to suit us, particularly if that planet has life on it already. We just don’t know where it is,” David said. “Is it a second genesis? Is it us, coming back?

“I put in the book that the ultimate irony is that perhaps Earth life was spawned by material coming from Mars, and the irony here is that we’re going to go back to our home planet. There are people who believe there is seeding going on between worlds.”

One of David’s bigger scoops, in fact, was a headline-grabbing piece for SpaceNews in 1996 concerning a meteorite discovered in the Allan Hills ice field of Antartica thought to have possibly originated on Mars. Some speculated that the rock dubbed ALH84001 contained microscopic and chemical evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet.

Pushing 70 years of age, David is resigned to the possibility that he won’t see the fruition of man’s dreams for Mars.

“I always look on this a little bit as a baton-passing thing,” he said. “I like the idea that I think I have contributed to people’s enthusiasm and interest, and hopefully, to be thoughtful about going to Mars. This is not a slam dunk. It’s going to be hard.”

As the vivid turning leaves of the aspen ringing his property waved in the sunlight off his outdoor balcony, David marveled at the complexity involved in man’s unraveling the mysteries of a different world.

“We’re into something unique, new and scary,” he said. “How do we do it? It won’t be easy to do. But it can be done.”

Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan