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

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