Imagine Mars

Mars desk

Mars

Jezero, Gale, Kaiser. Oxygen that flew. A rotor that flew. Ice that has not vanished. These papers stay on the planet. Starship and TeraFab live elsewhere on this desk.

Full research archiveObservatory

Curiosity Mastcam, Sol 4977: a layered sandstone outcrop in Gale crater, wind-scoured and pale.

Desk · 2026-09-20 · 10 min

Fluctuating Habitability

Water made the wet windows. Carbonate closed them.

Curiosity · Gale · Carbonates · Habitability · Kite

Ingenuity on the sand of Jezero after deployment from Perseverance: four legs, twin carbon rotors, solar panel on top. NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Desk · 2024-01-25 · 7 min

The First Rotor

Seventy-two flights. First powered flight on another world. A scout is not a city.

Perseverance · Ingenuity · Flight

The First Breath

Desk · 2023-09-06 · 7 min

The First Breath

Sixteen runs. 122 grams. 98% pure. Mars made oxygen for a rocket that has not left.

Perseverance · ISRU · Oxygen

The Floor Was Not the Lake

Desk · 2022-08-25 · 7 min

The Floor Was Not the Lake

They picked Jezero for the delta. The first rocks were magma.

Perseverance · Jezero · Geology

Metallic Waves on Ancient Mars

Desk · 2026-07-15 · 5 min

Metallic Waves on Ancient Mars

They look like metal. They are sand.

Mars Express · Geology · Dunes

The Oldest Wall

Desk · 2024-12-10 · 8 min

The Oldest Wall

The rover left the lake it was sent to and climbed the wall that made the lake.

Perseverance · Jezero · Geology

Yellowknife Bay mudstone in Gale crater, the Sheepbed outcrop where Curiosity drilled Cumberland.

Desk · 2026-08-19 · 12 min

Mars’s Subsurface Sanctuary

Curiosity found the largest organic molecules yet confirmed on Mars inside a 3.7-billion-year-old lakebed. Reconstructing what radiation destroyed may matter more than what survived.

Curiosity · Organics · Gale Crater

A dense star field over a dark horizon — the view this desk argues we have to reach.

Desk · 2026-08-19 · 12 min

The Imperative of Making Life Multiplanetary

Preserving and extending the light of consciousness — a tiny candle in a vast darkness that could easily go out.

Consciousness · Multiplanetary · First principles

The pale, wheel-fractured stone in Gediz Vallis that exposed yellow sulfur crystals.

Desk · 2026-08-19 · 12 min

The Rock That Broke Open Mars

Curiosity’s wheel fractured an ordinary stone in Gediz Vallis and exposed yellow crystals no mission had confirmed on Mars: native elemental sulfur.

Curiosity · Sulfur · Gediz Vallis

Starship on a dusty surface, illustrating the last meters of ISRU and landing dust.

Desk · 2026-08-19 · 8 min

The Last Meters of Dust

Starship can cross the vacuum. Return propellant cannot. The bottleneck is not interplanetary distance — it is meters of abrasive, buried ice.

ISRU · Starship · Ice

Mars’s crustal dichotomy: smooth northern lowlands meeting the cratered southern highlands.

X · 2026-08-19 · 9 min

The Martian Dichotomy

A 4-billion-year-old scar that decided where the last oases could live — and why the carbon cycle died.

Geophysics · Habitability · Perseverance

A dust-mantled ice tongue in the Martian mid-latitudes, crevassed and half-buried.

X · 2026-08-15 · 7 min

The Ice Is Not Vanishing

Twenty to thirty meters of global equivalent water. The loss rates are geological. The problem is extraction, not disappearance.

ISRU · Volatiles · MAVEN

A stainless-steel Starship standing on a dusty Martian plain at sunset, its shadow stretched across the ground.

X · 2026-08-09 · 11 min

Powering Mars

3.6 megawatts to keep a crew alive and fill two Starships. Solar is a dust-storm hostage. Fission is the baseload that makes return possible.

ISRU · Fission · Habitats

A speculative green Mars: darkened lowlands and a pale ocean covering much of the northern hemisphere.

X · 2026-08-10 · 5 min

Was Early Mars Green?

Ninety to ninety-nine percent chance it was livable, at least in pulses. Curiosity and Perseverance keep handing over the receipts.

Habitability · Curiosity · Perseverance

A dense star field over a dark horizon — the view this desk argues we have to reach.

X · 2026-08-19 · 4 min

A Single Planet Is a Failure Mode

Making life multiplanetary is not optional. It is the minimum requirement to turn a brief accident into a durable feature of the cosmos.

First principles · Civilization

Jezero crater’s ancient river delta, layered sediment fans on the crater floor.

Forge · 2026-04-09 · 5 min

MarsForge Technical Lite Briefing

Diameter, gravity, 6 mbar CO2, Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris, Jezero deltas. The community briefing that treats Mars as an engineering problem.

MarsForge · ISRU · Habitability

Late-afternoon Martian dunes, long shadows on pale dust under a thin salmon sky.

X · 2026-07-14 · 4 min

Why Mars, Not the Moon

The Moon cannot hold an atmosphere. Mars starts with CO2, ice, a 24.6-hour day, and 97% of Earth’s land mass. Self-sustaining civilization has a preferred planet.

First principles · Habitats · ISRU