A spaceship is preparing to land on Mars when the crew notices that one of the thrusters isn’t firing. There is, as they say, a problem. But there’s no use telling Houston—by the time a distress message reaches home more than 30 million miles away, either the astronauts on board will be space dust or humanity will have become an interplanetary species.
That’s the premise of National Geographic’s new series, Mars, which mixes documentary and speculation to tell the parallel stories of two groups: the fictional future explorers who will make that first journey, and the pioneers of today—scientists, astronauts, and strategists—who are blazing the trail. In the premier episode, for example, that white-knuckle landing scene is spliced with a look at Elon Musk’s SpaceX as engineers test a real retropropulsion landing system.
Every piece of tech in the show was designed to accurately reflect the current scientific vision of how we’ll get to Mars—and to avoid the gaffes that have undermined recent films and invited the wrath of astrophysicist/space ombudsman Neil deGrasse Tyson. As executive producer Ron Howard puts it, “It’s not sci-fi!” (Indeed, President Obama has outlined a vision to send humans into Mars’ orbit by the mid-2030s.). Here’s how Mars envisions our red future.
The six astronauts in Mars travel to their new home in a rocket called the Daedalus, and their ship is based on science that’s more than simply plausible—it’s coming, and fast. “This is technology that will probably be tested in the next five years,” executive producer Justin Wilkes says. The spacecraft is heavily inspired by SpaceX, but it also borrows design elements from NASA, Boeing, and even the Russian space program. “Other films say ‘Let’s make it look cool,’” production designer Sophie Becher says. “We asked, ‘How’s this going to function? Where are they going to use the bathroom?’”
Emerging director Everardo Gout (Days of Grace) shot the Mars colony in Budapest and Morocco, where the topography is so similar to the Red Planet’s that NASA has tested rovers there. Producers picked a specific location on Mars to replicate: the foothills of Olympus Mons, the planet’s tallest mountain, where underground lava tubes provide shelter and protection from cosmic radiation. (Scientists are studying Mars-like isolation in the lava tubes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.) The first Mars settlers would construct a bare-bones underground habitat in the tubes; over time, future missions would deliver additional materials, and the colony would expand, module by module. Once the original six welcome more inhabitants, this is how they would live.
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