The Right Martian Stuff
Robert Zubrin on the skills, temperament, and culture required to settle Mars
27 June 2025
For nearly half a century, American spaceflight has been haunted by a phrase.
The right stuff.
It sounds timeless, almost biblical. Not a skill you learn, not a checklist you complete, but something intrinsic. You either have it or you don’t. Courage without theatrics. Competence without complaint. A steady pulse as the rocket shakes itself awake beneath you.
When Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff in 1979, he did more than chronicle the early space program. He helped fossilize an identity. The astronaut, as Wolfe rendered him, was not merely a professional. He was a cultural archetype: laconic, competitive, resistant to introspection, and bound by an unspoken code of masculine honor that stretched back through the test pilots of Edwards Air Force Base and into the mythic American frontier.
Wolfe was fascinated less by space than by status. His astronauts were engaged in a constant, silent competition over who possessed more of that ineffable quality. Even as rockets grew more automated and missions more bureaucratic, the real drama unfolded in glances, rumors, and reputations. Who would fly first. Who would be trusted most. Who would crack under pressure. The machinery mattered, but the hierarchy mattered more.
That mythology worked. It helped Americans accept the idea of strapping human beings to volatile rockets and lighting the fuse. It framed spaceflight not just as engineering, but as moral theater. The astronaut became proof that the nation still produced men willing to risk everything without flinching.
But the world Wolfe described was narrow by design. It was short-duration. Militarized. Almost entirely male. And crucially, it was temporary. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Go. Do the thing. Come home.
Mars breaks that model.
Mars is not a test of who can ride the rocket. It is a test of who can live there.
Dr. Robert Zubrin, astronautical engineer and longtime president of The Mars Society, has spent decades insisting that this distinction matters. If The Right Stuff defined the astronaut of the twentieth century, Mars will demand an entirely different character in the twenty-first. Less swagger. More humility. Less obsession with individual heroics. More attention to the slow, grinding work of keeping a fragile human system alive.
In other words, the mythology that got us off the planet may not be the one that lets us stay.
Two Scottys, Two Spocks
Zubrin’s most famous shorthand comes from The Case for Mars, published in the mid-1990s, when Mars settlement still felt speculative rather than imminent. “In The Case for Mars,” he says, “where I said we want two Scottys and two Spock's in our four-person crew and other skills are secondary, I all stand by that.” It is a deliberately unromantic formulation. Scotty, the engineer who keeps impossible machines running. Spock, the scientist who understands why the mission matters at all. Between them lies survival and purpose.
“You want practical engineers,” Zubrin says. “People who are good with fixing things, whether it's hardware, software, plumbing. Because the survival of the expedition is going to depend on them.” This is not the kind of engineering that tends to dominate modern professional culture. It is not elegant design or abstract optimization. It is intuition and touch, the ability to listen to a machine and understand what it is trying to tell you.
Zubrin has seen this repeatedly in Mars analog missions. “At our Mars Desert and Arctic research stations, the most valuable person on the crew is the one who just has intuition to fix machines. A generator breaks down. An all-terrain vehicle fails. They just know what to do.” Often, he adds, these people come from backgrounds that never appear in astronaut recruitment posters. “A lot of them grew up on farms.” They learned early that manuals are helpful but incomplete, and that reality rarely behaves the way procedures assume. On Mars, reality will never cooperate. Systems will fail in ways no checklist anticipated. The environment will invent new problems daily. The person who freezes because the procedure does not match the situation is not heroic. They are dangerous.
After the fixers come the explorers, what Zubrin calls the intellectual payload. “You're going to Mars to explore. For that you need field scientists.” Only after those two roles does he place medicine. “Medical skill is important, but it’s a backup skill. It’s one you hope is never engaged.” The logic is unsentimental. Most crises on Mars will not begin as medical emergencies. They will begin as mechanical failures. Prevent the failures, and you prevent the emergencies.
Yet competence alone is not enough. A Mars mission is not saved by brilliance that corrodes the group. “You really do want to have a crew that has a one-for-all and all-for-one attitude.” Mars does not reward lone heroes. It rewards teams that can function without hierarchy becoming toxic and without competition turning corrosive.
“At our Mars Desert and Arctic research stations, the most valuable person on the crew is the one who just has intuition to fix machines. A generator breaks down. An all-terrain vehicle fails. They just know what to do.”
The Skills That Don’t Appear on Résumés
At some point, the conversation inevitably drifts away from job descriptions toward the softer, stranger skills that keep people human. Chess. A violin. A piano. Zubrin does not dismiss these as trivia. “That’s a good secondary skill,” he says, “to improve the social atmosphere in the crew.”
He recalls an Arctic mission with a young chemist who could also play piano. They had a small electric keyboard, and at night she would play Mozart. “She’d bang out some Mozart,” he says. “It was great.” The story sounds quaint until you imagine the context: a small group of people isolated for months, operating under constant constraint. No privacy. No escape. No relief from one another’s presence. In that setting, culture is not decoration. It is infrastructure.
Mars habitats will behave less like frontier cabins and more like submarines. Emotional tone will propagate quickly. Resentment spreads. Frustration compounds. A single person’s inability to manage disappointment can destabilize the entire group. This is why Zubrin returns again and again to humor. He describes a familiar scenario. Someone has waited months for their dedicated EVA. That morning, something breaks. Plumbing fails. Priorities shift. “You've got to take it in stride,” he says. “You've got to view it as funny.” Then he removes any ambiguity. “If you lose your sense of humor on your way to Mars, you're finished.”
This is not about cheerfulness. It is about emotional resilience, the ability to absorb frustration without externalizing it, and to understand that the mission is larger than your personal moment. Where Wolfe’s astronauts were defined by how they performed under pressure, Zubrin’s Martians are defined by how they behave when plans collapse.
Age, Ego, and the Long Mission
Zubrin talks about age the way an engineer talks about load distribution. “Young people have more energy,” he says, “but they're more competitive. They're trying to establish their importance.” Older people, by contrast, often arrive with fewer battles left to fight. “There was a time when it was really important for me to have my name on that paper. Now I’m more interested in having the idea accepted.”
Mars is unforgiving to ego. A two-and-a-half-year mission does not reward status games. It punishes them. That is why Zubrin is skeptical of crews built entirely from the mold of early astronauts. “You do not want to have a crew made of former test pilots, like the Apollo crews.” Apollo worked because it was short. Discipline and professionalism could override personal friction. “They could suck it up,” Zubrin says. “But it's one thing to do that on a six-day mission and another thing to do it for two and a half years.”
Mars requires something quieter and more durable: people who derive satisfaction from collective success rather than individual distinction, and who want to help one another. “You want people who want to build each other up.” The shift is subtle but profound. Wolfe’s astronauts competed to prove they had the right stuff. Zubrin’s Martians must survive without needing to prove anything at all.
The Geometry of Conflict
When the discussion turns to international crews, Zubrin becomes precise. “If you want an international crew,” he says, “they have to be internationalists.” He is wary of crews built as blocs, divided by language or ideology. “I’d rather have one from everywhere than two cliques.” Then comes the line that surprises people: “Flagged patriots are good in a national crew. They are not good in an international crew.”
This is not a political argument so much as a systems one. Mars amplifies divisions. Any identity that depends on opposition will eventually manufacture opposition inside the habitat. Zubrin applies the same logic across other lines of difference. “If you want to have both black and white people on a crew, you can’t have racists.” “If you want to have both men and women, you need people who see the opposite gender as people.” Mars will not tolerate unresolved social conflict. It will surface it quickly and punish it severely. Successful Martians will not be morally superior to Earthlings. They will simply lack the luxury of indulging certain reflexes.
Not Extinct, Just Scarcer
Are people like this still being produced?
“People who have the right stuff are not extinct,” Zubrin says.
But he adds a caveat.
“Whether those traits are as broadly spread as they once were, unfortunately not.” Even then, selection is tricky. Zubrin has learned that individual excellence on paper tells you surprisingly little about how someone will function inside a crew.
“The only way to really know if a crew works is to test it as a crew.”
His proposed method is blunt. Build several candidate crews. Put them in harsh environments. Let them operate for months.
“See which one performs best as a team.”
He has watched the same person thrive in one group and become toxic in another.
“The chemistry was wrong.”
Martians are not a personality type. They are a relationship that holds under stress.
“People who have the right stuff are not extinct.”
From Expeditions to Civilization
The most important shift happens when Mars stops being an expedition and becomes a settlement. “Settlers are different,” Zubrin says. A settlement needs teachers. Doctors with bedside manner. People good with children. Artists. Organizers. Caregivers. “You need the full spectrum of human skills.” This is where culture becomes unavoidable. “You’re going to want to develop a culture.”
Zubrin describes culture as a point of departure, borrowing from early American history. Colonial Massachusetts, with its emphasis on literacy, produced civic institutions that echoed for centuries. Mars will not start from nothing. It will amplify whatever values arrive first.
He rejects the idea of a single, unified Martian society. “I don’t think that’s how Mars is going to look.” Instead, he imagines multiple colonies with different visions of what Mars should be. The ones that thrive will not be the most rigid, but the most livable. “The one that outgrows the others will be the one that attracts immigrants.” Population growth, he notes, depends especially on women being willing to live there. That is how a base becomes a society.
Mars becomes a civilization when it grows its own food, builds its own infrastructure, and raises children. “People will have children,” Zubrin says. “Kids running around the base.” At that point, Mars stops being a project and starts being home.
Signal Received
For decades, “the right stuff” meant a narrow kind of courage, captured brilliantly by Tom Wolfe and embedded deep in the American imagination. Mars demands something else. It demands people who can fix what breaks, laugh when plans collapse, and care about one another when caring is inconvenient. People who value competence over swagger, chemistry over charisma, and community over conquest.
If Mars becomes a civilization, it will not be because its founders were fearless. It will be because they were the kind of people others wanted to live near, raise children around, and trust when the plumbing failed.
That may be the new right stuff after all. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Robert Zubrin for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode titled "The Right Martian Stuff" which aired on 24 June 2025.