Great article! One of the best on here thus far!

I also took my time posting about this as well, and it is good to see Zubrin put out a \”road map\” specifying the details of how this would happen.

Although the asteroid and mirror ideas are not financially sound (as it would be cheaper and more profitable to mine the asteroids and ditch the mirrors) the CO2 factories hold enormous promise.

Regarding the Martian gardens, I don\’t know how he is going to \”aggressively harvest\” them without taking away too much fertilizer from these plants. It may be easier to simply allow them to \”rot\” and use machines to filter out the CO2 and oxygen as well.

One thing he has NOT mentioned (something he should factor in) is that humans seem to enjoy war and fighting and Mars will be no exception to that. This could delay the plan by another 1,000 years if you include global hurricanes and disease as well.

Mars also has no known resources so it may not draw much interest outside of the scientific community.

As far as whether or not we should colonize Mars, I\’ll leave that option up to the future generations (as we have to colonize the Moon first).

cool article about mars. Thank you. It gives me insight about the red planet.