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In the wake of the very public failures of the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, NASA embarked on a complete reassessment of the Mars Program.

Scott Hubbard was asked to lead this restructuring in 2000, becoming known as the "Mars Czar."

His team's efforts resulted in a very successful decade-long series of missions—each building on the accomplishments of those before it—that adhered to the science adage "follow the water" when debating how to proceed.

Now for the first time Scott Hubbard tells the complete story of how he fashioned this program, describing both the technical and political forces involved and bringing to life the national and international cast of characters engaged in this monumental endeavor.

“Space-exploration and Mars enthusiasts will find much here to whet their appetites.”

Booklist

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“It’s high time somebody revealed the underbelly of why and how we travel to the Red Planet. Leave it to NASA’s ‘Mars Czar’ Scott Hubbard to tell this story. Yes, we’re all explorers, but every mission to space is enabled by financial, political, and cultural forces that you never hear about—without which there’d be no enterprise of discovery at all.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Mars is not a friendly place—and neither is Washington. Scott Hubbard knows how to navigate deftly in both places—and the end result is a Mars exploration campaign that emerged like a Phoenix from a pair of smoking holes in the rusty red soil. His story is filled with outsized egos, undersized budgets, and nail-biting tension as he performs mission impossible: turning an epic failure into a space-age triumph.”

— Miles O’Brien

Exploring Mars is Hubbard’s absorbing story of how he [helped NASA], starting by creating teams of talented scientists and engineers inside a headquarters building that is, as he writes, ‘a combination of alphabet soup and numerology’ that was rife with internal politics and power trips.”

San Francisco Chronicle
(click to read the full review)

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New Space is the only international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to academic, industry, and government contributions to space entrepreneurship and innovation.

Read the 20+ collected editorials of founding Editor-in-Chief Scott Hubbard; March 2013 (Issue 1 No. 1) through March 2019.

“A Next Decade Mars Program” by Scott Hubbard

“A Next Decade Mars Program” by Scott Hubbard