MarsX the Novel

Image – ID 218650378 | Mars © 3000ad | Dreamstime.com

I will soon be releasing the eBook version of MarsX, which is a novel combining the three novelettes MarsX1, MarsX2, and MarsX3. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Elon Musk:

“The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet, and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.”

The almost epigraph for the book was going to be a quote from the novel This Island Earth (which later became a movie) by Raymond Jones:

"Earth is an island, which can be by-passed completely, or temporarily occupied if need be."

The Musk quote fits well for the adventure of getting settlers to Mars, but the one from This Island Earth works better for the authoritative AI in the book which drove the mission. It would have also been fitting since This Island Earth was a "mashup" of three novelettes also. But I think these days that Elon Musk and Mars are inseparable.

In MarsX, the three protagonists are being pushed by a newly arisen super-intelligence to move millions of Earth's population to Mars, for purposes the AI never specifies (though the characters hypothesize).

Anyway, besides using a quote from Musk, I used his company SpaceX as a model of a quickly growing rocket company (growing even quicker in the book).

From the book Liftoff by Eric Berger and internet sources, I got the following employee numbers for SpaceX and used them as a guide to the fictional company Novara and its Mars rocket, which was to be called Tharsis.

SpaceX Approximate Employment Numbers:

2002 – founded

2005 – 160 employees

2008 – F1 first flight, 500 employees

2010 – F9 first flight, 1100 employees

2012 – 1800 employees

2013 – 2800 employees

2015 – 5000 employees

2018 – FH first flight

2021 – 9500 employees

2023 – SH first flight, 12000 employees

2025 – 15000 employees

I believe F1 is for Falcon 1, F9 is for Falcon 9, FH is for Falcon Heavy, and SH is for Super Heavy (Starship flight).

One place I diverged from the Musk plan was that Novara developed a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) for the Mars missions (though they would use a heavy-lift chemical rocket called the Universe-class, like Starship, to get people and supplies into orbit). I envisioned the NTR as a kind of ferry that would take several Universe-class rockets from Earth orbit to Mars orbit, where they would separate and the Universe-class would land. The NTR was modeled a good bit on my fusion ship design from the Future Chron Universe. You can read about that here: Fusion Spaceships.

In the summer of 2025, I never expected that NASA would decide to develop a nuclear-powered engine for its Mars Skyfall mission in December 2028, though it's not a nuclear thermal rocket. Still, nuclear propulsion in space has been stifled for various reasons most of my life.

MarsX: A Novel will be released in eBook May 20 on Amazon and other stores. The book is already released in paperback, just search my name on your favorite site.