Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis:
The Red Planet has long captured human imagination, going at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, who designated it the god of war. In the modern era, once it was understood that Mars was another planet in our system that could be seen through telescopes, it became romanticized by astronomers like Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell, generating dreams of canals and life and civilizations — dreams later disappointed by instruments showing it to be apparently lifeless and desiccated.
Reviewed in this articleBut no one in history has more popularized the idea of Mars being a suitable place for the expansion of humanity than Robert Zubrin. A nuclear and aerospace engineer and founder and president of the Mars Society [and a contributing editor of this journal –Ed.], Zubrin first proposed his plans for getting to the planet and settling there at the 1990 International Space Development Conference, which I attended. He called the plan “Mars Direct,” to distinguish it from NASA’s more convoluted and less economical plan.
more here.