You Will Go to Mars

A true story

Abundance press · 2026

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You Will Go to Mars

ABUNDANCE Press · Earth

A dark bedroom window at night. Stars fill the sky and one small red point of light shines: Mars. A telescope on a tripod points toward it.
Mars looks like a small red star.

Mars is up there, far away.

It looks like a little red star. It is not a star. It is a place.

People have walked on the Moon. No one has walked on Mars yet.

But someone will go there soon.

Some day you may go there, too.

· 1 ·
A tall silver rocket with a row of small round windows under its nose stands on its launch pad beside a dark catch tower. Tiny people watch from far below.
The people are small. The rocket is big.

This is your rocket.

It is taller than any rocket that has ever flown.

You will ride at the very top, in the part with the windows.

Everything you need is packed below you.

Air. Water. Food. A deck of cards.

· 2 ·
A textbook diagram: the Sun in the middle, Earth's orbit and Mars's orbit around it, and a dashed golden arc showing the short road from Earth to Mars.
It is easiest to go when the trip will be shortest.

You cannot leave on just any day.

Earth moves fast around the Sun. Mars moves slow.

Once every 26 months, Earth catches up to Mars.

On that day the road to Mars is short.

On that day, you will go.

See: The Launch Window
· 3 ·
The rocket climbs above the curved blue edge of Earth into a black sky, its row of cabin windows lit. The sun and the stars shine at the same time.
In space, nothing spreads the sunlight around. The sky stays black all day.

Up. Up. Up.

The rumble pushes you down into your seat.

In a few minutes the blue sky is gone, and the sky turns black.

Look. The sun is out, and so are the stars. Both at once.

Then the engines stop, and it is quiet, and you are floating.

You are on your way.

· 4 ·
Inside the ship, a traveller floats sideways reading a book. A pencil, an apple and a blob of water float too. Through the porthole, stars, and one small red dot growing closer.
Your pencil floats. Your apple floats. You float.

The trip takes about seven months.

In the ship, nothing weighs anything at all.

You will strap yourself into bed so you do not drift away in your sleep.

Every day you will walk on a machine, so your bones do not forget the ground.

The ship has a special room surrounded by water and supplies. It is where you go when the sun’s rays get too strong.

There is a lot of time to read. And to play.

See: The Cruise
· 5 ·
A diagram of Earth and the far-away ship. A wavy radio signal crawls across the long distance between them. A small clock shows twenty minutes.
A conversation with a pause in the middle.

Home gets a little farther away every minute. Every hour.

Some days your radio “hello” takes twenty minutes to arrive.

The answer takes twenty minutes to come back.

So you will not call home. You will send messages, and voices, and films.

And every day, home will send them to you.

See: Calling Home
· 6 ·
The ship rides its engine flame down beside the spaceport's tall tower, whose steel arms reach out to catch it above the billowing red dust.
Too little air to float down. So you ride the fire, and the tower catches you.

Now Mars is big in your window.

The air on Mars is very, very thin. Too thin for a parachute.

So your ship turns around, points its feet at the ground, and fires its engines.

Down, down, slower, slower. The spaceport's tall tower reaches out two great steel arms, and catches your ship right out of the air.

A cloud of red dust rolls away in every direction.

You are there.

· 7 ·
Children wave at the terminal rail as the silver ship stands upright on the empty pad outside, three rows of lit round windows at the top of its nose, the covered boarding bridge stretching from its door to the spaceport tower.
Arrivals, Gate 1. (There is only Gate 1.)

You will not just hop out onto the dirt. Mars runs a spaceport.

The tower sets your ship gently down on its pad, and a covered bridge swings out to meet the door. Just like at the airport.

You walk across in your shirt sleeves, light as a balloon. You are lighter here.

So your first step on Mars is really a little bounce.

And behind the terminal's big window, look. The whole town is waving.

They have been waiting twenty-six months for new faces. Welcome to Mars.

See: Your Weight on Mars
· 8 ·
The Mars town: every dome buried under a thick mound of rust-red soil, round doorways and glowing portholes peeking out, white tunnels running between them, solar panels and dish antennas on the mounds, little rovers below, and nothing but hazy butterscotch sky beyond.
Look! Do you see that low white hill? That is the Mars house.

Look! Do you see that low white dome?

That is the Mars house.

That is where you will live on Mars.

Its roof gets piled thick with Mars soil, to keep out the space rays.

White tunnels run from dome to dome, so you can walk to breakfast without your suit on.

Inside, the bunks are tucked deep under the soil, where the space rays cannot reach at all.

Your bunk is the deepest one down. It is the safest, coziest spot in town.

· 9 ·
Inside a vast greenhouse dome on Mars, long rows of lettuce and tomato plants grow in white trays without soil, under lamps that glow pink, while the rust-orange desert waits outside the window.
The biggest room on Mars.

Down the tunnel from your bunk is the biggest room on Mars.

Everyone calls it the green room.

Rows and rows of lettuce, and kale, and little tomato plants grow in trays. There is no soil.

The lamps glow pink, because plants drink the red and blue light and leave the green.

Astronauts already garden this way on the space station. They say the lettuce is delicious.

You will do your homework in the green room. It smells like home.

See: The Green Room
· 10 ·
A cutaway of the oxygen machine: a golden ribbed cube like the real MOXIE instrument, thin red Mars air drawn in through a round intake, and a pipe carrying fresh oxygen out to a sealed silver tank.
Mars gives you the air, if you bring the machine.

You cannot breathe the air on Mars.

It is almost all carbon dioxide. The gas you breathe out.

So your machines breathe it in, and turn it into oxygen.

A small machine named MOXIE already did this on Mars, in 2021.

Your machines will be much bigger. They will fill your tanks and your rocket.

See: Making Oxygen
· 11 ·
The driverless ice convoy rolls home across rippled orange dunes: the rover's glass dome empty, the trailers' cargo sealed under tarps, a little robot following, the base domes waiting on the horizon.
The ice convoy rolling home from the mine.

On Mars, water goes around, and around, and around again.

Machines catch every drop: the steam from your cocoa, the fog of your breath. Then they clean it all back into drinking water.

When the town needs more, the ice convoy rolls home from the mine. The ice sealed up tight in its trailers, so the thin air cannot steal one drop on the way. Soon there will be pipes that will connect the ice to your house.

The ice was dug from just under the soil.

On Mars, nothing is wasted.

See: The Water
· 12 ·
Through the round window of the Mars house, the whole sky has turned tan with dust. Inside, two travellers play cards under a warm lamp.
Outside: the biggest weather in the solar system. Inside: cards.

A day on Mars is called a sol. It is a little longer than a day at home.

Mars is colder than the coldest winter anywhere on Earth.

And some years, the wind lifts the red dust up, and up, until the storm covers the whole planet at once.

Then you will stay inside, and play cards, and wait.

The dust always settles. It can take months.

See: Sols, Cold & Dust
· 13 ·
A boxy white pressurized rover like NASA's real prototype, with a bubble cockpit window and many small wheels, crosses the orange dunes leaving tracks.
The family car, Mars edition.

Some sols you will pack the rover and go exploring.

It is a little house on wheels. Inside you can take your helmet off and drive in your shirt.

Slow and steady it rolls, over the dunes and around the craters, for days at a time.

A little robot rover named Opportunity once drove a whole marathon here. It took eleven years.

You will drive a marathon before lunch.

See: The Drive
· 14 ·
Evening on Mars. The butterscotch sky darkens, and the small setting sun glows inside a soft halo of blue above dark hills. One lit window shines in the Mars house.
The sky that is red all day says goodnight in blue.

At home, the sky is blue and the sunset is red.

On Mars, it is the other way around.

All day the sky is a dusty butterscotch color.

But when the sun goes down, it sets inside a little circle of blue.

Most nights you will watch it from your window with your hot milk.

But some nights you will suit up, and climb the ridge, and see it fill the whole sky.

Nobody ever gets tired of it.

See: The Blue Sunset
· 15 ·
Dusk on Mars after sunset: a parent and child in white spacesuits and round helmets stand on the dark shadowless hill, the child pointing up at one brilliant blue-white evening star glowing softly in the warm haze: Earth, with everyone you know on it.
From Mars, Earth is the little blue star.

After a year and a half on Mars, Earth swings near again, and the short road home opens.

Maybe you will climb aboard and go home.

Maybe you will stay, and help build the town.

Either way, remember.

The first person to walk on Mars is alive today, somewhere on Earth, probably learning things.

It might be someone you know.

It might be you.

· 16 ·

The Science of Your Mars Trip

Launch Window
Earth laps Mars about once every 26 months. That is when a spacecraft can take the short, low-energy road. Miss the window, and you wait for the next lap. Source: NASA/JPL: Mars 2020 launch press kit
Cruise
The Perseverance rover flew the same way in 2020–21: a 203-day journey, about seven months, traversing 293 million miles. Source: NASA/JPL: Perseverance landing release
Weight on Mars
Mars pulls with about a third of Earth’s gravity: a person who weighs 100 pounds on Earth weighs about 38 pounds on Mars. Source: NASA: What Is Mars?
Air
Mars’s thin atmosphere is more than 95% carbon dioxide and much less than 1% oxygen.Source: NASA: What Is Mars?
Making Oxygen
MOXIE, an experiment aboard the Perseverance rover, made oxygen from Mars air 16 times between 2021 and 2023: 122 grams in all, at up to 12 grams an hour, 98% pure or better. Source: NASA/JPL: MOXIE completes its mission
Water
A Mars town runs on recycled water. The space station’s life-support system already recovers 98% of its water: dehumidifiers capture the crew’s breath and sweat, and a vacuum recovers water from urine. Top-up water is in the ground: in 2008 NASA’s Phoenix lander dug a trench and exposed bright chunks that vaporized over four days: proof, the scientists said, “that this hard bright material is really water ice.” Sources: NASA: 98% water recovery milestone · NASA/JPL: Phoenix confirms frozen water
Drive
NASA’s plan for exploring on the surface is a pressurized rover: a mobile habitat where astronauts live and work inside, covering far longer distances than walks from base camp. In the suitport design, spacesuits stay docked outside the cabin: suit-up drops from hours to under thirty minutes, and the dust stays out. For scale, the robot rover Opportunity drove a marathon in just over 11 years, “the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world.” Sources: NASA: Pressurized rover · NASA NTRS: Suitport · NASA/JPL: Opportunity’s marathon
Green Room
Astronauts already garden in space: NASA’s Veggie chamber on the space station has grown three kinds of lettuce, Chinese cabbage, mizuna mustard, red Russian kale and zinnia flowers. Its LED lamps glow magenta-pink because plants use mostly red and blue light. Fresh food matters on a long trip, because vitamins in prepackaged food break down over time. Source: NASA: Growing Plants in Space
Sols, Cold & Dust
Mars turns once every 24.6 hours (one sol) and circles the Sun in 687 Earth days. It can reach 70 °F (20 °C) on a nice day and about −225 °F (−153 °C) on a bad one. Winds sometimes whip up dust storms that cover much of the planet. Source: NASA Science: Mars facts
Calling Home
Mars is on average 140 million miles away, radio messages can take up to 20 minutes each way, and a crew would be away from Earth for roughly three years. Source: NASA Human Research Program: Distance from Earth
Blue Sunset
Martian sunsets really are blue: the fine dust in the sky lets blue light through toward you while scattering the yellows and reds, so a cool blue glow gathers around the setting sun. Source: NASA Science: Sunrise and sunset on Mars
The Place Itself
Mars is about half the size of Earth, with a radius of 2,106 miles. It is a small world, but it is a whole world, with volcanoes, canyons, ice caps and weather. Source: NASA Science: Mars facts

Take the book home

With enough demand, You Will Go to Mars is being made as a real casebound picture book.

first printing 2026

You Will Go to Mars

Mars is up there, far away. No one has walked on it yet. But someone will, soon. And this book, like the one before it, intends to be right.

Every fact inside is real, checked, and sourced from NASA. The rest is a promise.

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