• International Collaboration Success: The mission featured significant scientific contributions from multiple countries across Europe and the United States, reflecting a transition toward cooperative space exploration after the Cold War.
• Significant Technical Scope: Designed as a highly complex mission, the spacecraft included a primary orbiter, two autonomous landers, and two specialized penetrators meant to analyze the Martian environment from multiple perspectives.
• Catastrophic Launch Failure: Due to an ignition error in the upper stage, the spacecraft failed to achieve its intended trajectory and remained trapped in Earth's orbit before reentering the atmosphere.
• Uncertain Impact Location: Analysis indicated the probe likely descended over an elliptical path spanning the Pacific Ocean, Bolivia, and northern Chile, though no official recovery efforts were ever conducted.
• Potential For Undiscovered Debris: Due to the durable design of the hardened penetrators and radioisotope heater units, it remains possible that intact components from the spacecraft exist in remote Andean terrain.

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Concept illustration of Mars-96 penetrators descending toward the Martian surface. (credit: NPO Lavochkin / Russian Academy of Sciences, via NASA SP-4515)

Thirty years later, Mars 96 has not been found

Unprecedented scientific collaboration, catastrophic failure, and an uncertain final resting place

by Dante Sanaei

Monday, April 6, 2026

On the night of November 16, 1996, a strange light moved slowly across the skies of Chile. Observers in remote mountain regions described a brilliant object traveling horizontally along the horizon, far brighter than any star and leaving behind a luminous trail that lingered in the thin air. Unlike a meteor’s sudden flash, this phenomenon endured. For nearly a minute it crossed the darkness, shedding faint fragments that glowed briefly before fading from view. In the Andes, a landscape defined by silence and vast distances, the event felt both unmistakably real and deeply uncertain—something that did not belong in the usually peaceful night sky.

In the new political landscape of the early 1990s, some began to imagine a different future, one in which the next great attempt to reach Mars might be undertaken not in rivalry, but together. Maybe old foes could become friends.

Among those who witnessed the passage was John VanderBrink, an electronics specialist at the European Southern Observatory near La Serena, who was camping in the mountains of southern Chile at the time. He later recalled that he “had no illusions that it was anything other than a piece of space debris.” That same night, thousands of miles away, scientists and engineers in Moscow were confronting a different burning realization. A spacecraft they had launched only hours earlier, bound for Mars, was missing.

This is the story of Mars 96.

A new era of interplanetary collaboration

Nearly five years earlier, the Soviet Union had dissolved, ending the decades-long Cold War that had defined the first half-century of the Space Age. From Sputnik’s sudden shock in 1957 to Neil Armstrong’s steps onto the lunar surface in 1969, exploration beyond Earth had grown up in an environment of Soviet-American rivalry. With the emergence of the Russian Federation, an uncertain question emerged: what would become of the space race that had shaped modern planetary exploration?

Mars in particular had long represented unreachable opportunity. For decades, American and Soviet spacecraft attempted flybys, orbit insertions, and landings with uneven success. The Soviet Mars-3 probe achieved the first soft landing on the planet in 1971, though contact was lost after just 20 seconds. NASA’s Mariner and Viking missions later secured sustained orbital observations and the first long-lived surface operations. Between 1960 and 1988, the two nations launched more than two dozen missions toward Mars. In the new political landscape of the early 1990s, some began to imagine a different future, one in which the next great attempt to reach Mars might be undertaken not in rivalry, but together. Maybe old foes could become friends.

Very quickly this hoped-for collaboration began to take institutional form. Bilateral agreements signed in 1992 opened the way for joint US-Russian human spaceflight, and in 1993 Russia was invited into the redesigned station program that would eventually become the International Space Station. The following year, Shuttle-Mir began in earnest, pairing American astronauts with Russian cosmonauts and turning the aging Mir station into a laboratory for post-Cold War partnership.

Mars 96 was born in that atmosphere of cautious optimism. The mission was Russian-led but unmistakably multinational in character: its scientific payload drew on contributions from Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Austria, and the United States. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab would excitedly describe their contribution of two science payloads as “part of the expanding U.S.-Russian cooperation effort in space exploration.”

Mars 96 was not merely another probe bound for a distant planet, but a statement about what the post-Cold War space age might become: an era of interplanetary collaboration.

Built for another world

The Russians had built a highly ambitious mission. Mars 96 contained two surface landers, two surface penetrators, and an orbiter. At more than 6,500 kilograms, the payload was the largest interplanetary spacecraft humans had ever launched. The Proton-K rocket would carry more than 40 science instruments to the Red Planet. Their purpose was to study the atmosphere, the surface, the climate, the magnetic field, and search for water and potential life: just about everything there is to do on Mars. The spacecraft represented not just a return for Russia, but one of the most complex planetary expeditions ever attempted.

Mars 96 was to explore the planet simultaneously from above, on the surface, and beneath it. The three-axis-stabilized orbiter was intended to operate for approximately two Earth years in a highly elliptical, near-polar orbit, gradually mapping nearly the entire surface of Mars. Two small autonomous stations (Malaya avtonomnaya stantsiya) were to be released ahead of orbital insertion, descending to the surface cushioned by inflatable shells that would split open after touchdown. Once deployed, their instruments would photograph the surrounding terrain and analyze local soil and atmospheric conditions. A similar airbag-assisted landing concept would gain public recognition just a year later with NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission.

Engineering model of one of two Mars 96 surface landers on display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center. (credit: Sanjay Acharya / CC BY-SA)

Even more unusual were the mission’s two hardened penetrators: long, cylindrical probes intended to strike the ground at high velocity and bury themselves several meters below the surface. From this protected position they would measure seismic activity and subsurface heat flow, forming part of a distributed scientific network that could continue transmitting data for up to a year. If successful, Mars 96 would have produced one of the most comprehensive datasets on the planet since the Viking era.

In mid-November 1996, after years of design, delay, and renewed international coordination, final launch preparations were underway at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Engineers, mission operators, and visiting scientists gathered as the fully assembled vehicle stood poised for departure.

The next stop was Mars.

The long fall back home

Shortly after midnight on November 16, 1996, the engines ignited and Mars 96 began its ascent into space. The spacecraft first entered a temporary parking orbit roughly 160 kilometers above Earth, completing its initial critical burn about 20 minutes after liftoff. As it crossed the Pacific within range of both Russian and American tracking stations, controllers prepared for the next stage of the carefully choreographed escape sequence. A second firing of the upper stage was meant to accelerate the probe toward interplanetary velocity, after which it would separate and ignite its own engine to complete the departure for Mars.

If successful, Mars 96 would have produced one of the most comprehensive datasets on the planet since the Viking era.

At this point, something went seriously wrong. The upper stage either failed to ignite properly or shut down almost immediately, leaving the spacecraft trapped in Earth orbit. Yet the onboard autopilot continued executing its programmed sequence, separating from the stage and firing its own engine as if the mission were proceeding normally. Solar panels unfolded, telemetry was transmitted, and for a brief moment engineers at the main Russian tracking center in Crimea believed that Mars 96 was successfully on its way to another planet. Only when orbital data began to arrive did the realization set in: the spacecraft had never escaped Earth’s gravity. It would soon be returning home—quite rapidly, in fact.

Early assessments by US Space Command suggested that the spacecraft, carrying small quantities of plutonium heater material, might reenter over remote regions of Australia. Concern quickly reached the highest levels of government. President Bill Clinton held a telephone conversation with Australian Prime Minister John Howard to offer full American support for any search and recovery operation that might become necessary. As additional tracking data arrived the projected impact zone shifted repeatedly. By Sunday evening in Washington, analysts concluded that the debris had most likely burned up west of Chile near Easter Island, ending the immediate concern.

But this would not be the end of the story. In the weeks that followed, reentry tracking data, notoriously difficult to predict with precision, underwent further analysis. US Space Command gradually refined its estimates, suggesting that debris from Mars 96 may have fallen within a broad elliptical corridor stretching across the eastern Pacific and into parts of northern Chile and Bolivia.

White House spokesman David Johnson later told reporters that this updated information had been shared with regional governments “as soon as we concluded that there was a possibility of something falling there.”

The uncertainty persisted. The following March, US Space Command acknowledged that it was aware of eyewitness reports from Chile. “We were aware of a number of eyewitness accounts of the re-entry event via the media several weeks after the re-entry occurred,” wrote Major Stephen Boylan, Chief of the Media Division at the command’s headquarters in Colorado Springs. “Upon further analysis, we believe it is reasonable that the impact was in fact on land.”

A search was never performed. Nobody went looking for Mars 96.

Designed to survive impact

No matter the eventual landing site, Mars 96 certainly did not reenter Earth’s atmosphere in the elegant manner they had been designed for at Mars. Interestingly enough, it remains within the realm of possibility that the mission’s two surface penetrators survived. Built to strike the rocky Martian surface at roughly 70 to 80 meters per second and continue operating underground, they were constructed with thick, compact casings intended to endure violent impact. The chaotic aerodynamic forces of atmospheric breakup may well have destroyed them before reaching the ground, but it is equally conceivable that one or both endured the descent and came to rest largely in one piece.

It remains within the realm of possibility that the mission’s two surface penetrators survived.

Another possible surprise for the Andes involves the spacecraft’s 18 radioisotope heater units (RHUs). The small plutonium-238 powered radioisotope heater units were specifically engineered to survive catastrophic events, such as launch accidents or an atmospheric reentry over South America. Similar incidents had occurred before. In 1978, fragments of the Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Cosmos-954 were scattered across remote regions of northern Canada after an uncontrolled descent.

There is a strange irony in the possibility that hardware built to endure the violence of arrival at Mars may instead have proven its worth in an accidental descent back to Earth.

The wrong planet

There is something quietly absurd about the fate of Mars 96.

A spacecraft engineered to be tracked from hundreds of millions of kilometers away may instead have vanished somewhere on Eart, a world mapped in exquisite detail by satellites, aircraft, and increasingly by ordinary people carrying cameras in their pockets

Three decades later, its final resting place remains unknown.

It is possible that fragments were scattered across the Pacific, broken apart by the violence of reentry. It is also possible that more durable components survived largely intact, coming to rest in remote terrain rarely visited by humans. Somewhere in a dry valley, across the windswept Altiplano, or among the salt flats and volcanic slopes of the high Andes, hardware built for another planet may still lie quietly under open sky. Above such places, Mars appears no closer than it did on the night the spacecraft fell back to Earth.

Today, it does seem that the Russian Mars exploration program ended on a sour note. To date, Russia has not successfully sent an independent Mars mission to the Red Planet.

Elements of Mars 96’s scientific legacy endured. Many of the instrument science teams would contribute to future successful spacecraft such as the Mars Express orbiter launched in 2003. The lander’s Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer, developed by the University of Chicago, would reach Mars just months later aboard NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission, where a closely related unit began returning chemical readings from the surface of another world. One instrument was fulfilling its purpose on Mars, quietly carrying forward the work its lost sibling would never perform.

There is a Russian proverb: “One beaten person is worth two unbeaten ones.”

Still waiting

Thirty years have passed with no definite conclusion. One day, a hiker, miner, or researcher may come upon an object that does not belong: compact, metallic, and unmistakably built for another world. Or maybe not.

Somewhere on the wrong planet, Mars 96 may still be waiting.

Mars 96 was, above all, a mission of extraordinary collaboration and ambition. Conceived in Russia but carrying instruments and scientific hopes from across Europe and the United States, it reflected a brief moment when planetary exploration felt shared rather than divided. Its failure was swift and largely unceremonious, and in the decades since, it has survived mostly in technical literature and the fading recollections of those who helped build and launch it.

Its ultimate resting place remains genuinely uncertain. Whether its surviving fragments lie somewhere in the remote Andes, deep beneath ocean waters, or lost in ways that will never be known, nobody will ever go looking for it. What endures is the idea it once carried: that ambitious cooperation can be set into motion even in fragile circumstances. Like the spacecraft itself, collaboration was launched but never quite arrived.

Somewhere on the wrong planet, Mars 96 may still be waiting.

Sources

Siddiqi, A. A., Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958–2016, NASA History Division, 2018.

Oberg, J., “The Probe That Fell to Earth,” New Scientist, 1999.

Clinton, W. J., “The President’s News Conference,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 25 November 1996.

United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Report on the Re-entry of the Russian Mars-96 Spacecraft.

Perminov, V. G., The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the Soviet Union, NASA SP-4515, 1999.

NASA Office of Inspector General, NASA’s International Partnerships, 2016.

NASA, “Space Station 20th: Launch of Mir 18 Crew,” 2020.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars-96 Press Kit.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “U.S. Soil Experiment Ready to Launch Aboard Russia’s Mars-96.”

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “NASA Mars Orbiter Images May Show 1971 Soviet Lander.”

Malin Space Science Systems, “Mars 96 Penetrators.”

Rieder, R., Wänke, H., and Economou, T., “An Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer for Mars-96 and Mars Pathfinder,” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 1996.

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Dante Sanaei is an aerospace engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

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Over the last century, global power was defined entirely by the geography of transit. The map of energy and geopolitical power was flat, two-dimensional, and dictated by wherever molecules of oil, gas, or petroleum by-products could be scraped out of the Earth and squeezed through narrow physical passageways such as the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz. Those who controlled those chokepoints — as Iran does the Strait — have wielded outsize power.

The British and the Europeans, having held back from joining the American attack on Iran, have been enjoying a sense of collective moral superiority over President Donald Trump. This leaves them unable to see that the United States is executing a geopolitical checkmate that will define the 21st century. The checkmate is that America is now quietly building a new Suez. This new Suez isn’t a trench dug in the sand; it is a pipeline of electrons and light connecting America to the stars.

As a result, the world no longer needs that two-dimensional map of Earth. The new map is three-dimensional. It connects Earth to space and renders terrestrial blockades completely irrelevant. Why are the Americans speeding up the move into space? Because that’s where we find treasures in the form of unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited mining, refining and manufacturing, and control of the most important warfighting domain — space itself. After all, America is fighting the war in Iran mainly from space. The Artemis launch is not a coincidence. It is confirmation of the plan’s progress.

And the plan works like this. If Iran closes the Strait, the closure has absolutely zero impact on a Starlink V3 mesh network beaming tactical data and artificial intelligence from low Earth orbit. The US is now relocating the central arteries of the global economy — computation, communications, intelligence and even energy production — into space, permanently removing them from the reach of earthly geopolitics. Space is the new form of what Leninists called the “commanding heights”. In all, the US is bypassing the earthbound chokepoints with a new supply chain of atoms: safe nuclear energy, light that flows from the sun, and even — via small mobile modular nuclear reactors and the new materials that will make nuclear fusion possible — stars that fly in a box.

While the global media mocks and decries Trump’s warmongering, then, it fails to register the decisive moves on the geopolitical chessboard. Before cornering the Iranian leadership, the US had systematically cut off its cash flows and eliminated its key collaborators, especially across Latin America. In Venezuela, the US took control of the oil supply by removing Nicolás Maduro and cutting a pragmatic deal with his successor. In Mexico, the US removed “El Mencho”, the head of the most important energy-controlling cartel in the country. The result is that these nations don’t dare sell their oil molecules if the US doesn’t approve of it. The US didn’t do regime change; it did regime control and molecule monopoly. The world must buy American now.

The US wins both ways. It has the molecules that matter. Chip production depends on helium, and the world’s largest helium reserve is now in Abilene, Texas. While the world shuts down fertilizer plants for lack of the ammonia and nitrogen that Qatar can no longer supply, the US has pioneered in the production of green ammonia, which is produced using only water, air, and electricity. By mixing green ammonia with captured carbon, the US now produces green urea, a critical component of fertilizers. When combined, green ammonia and green urea are the first fertilizer in history that is completely delinked from the global natural gas market. That’s the holy grail of resource independence, because it represents a total decoupling of food production from the fossil fuel grid.

In addition, the US now has everything it needs to produce electric vehicles and batteries. Formerly, its supply of sulfuric acid, which is necessary for the production of these products, would have been badly affected by the bombing of Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub. But today, American firms know how to capture sulfur as a byproduct of America’s new nickel and copper mines. What’s more, America can use its home-grown sulfur to turn its phosphate reserves, and those of countries such as Morocco, into even more fertilizer. America is therefore not only the only fertilizer-secure breadbasket left on Earth; it is also beginning to control other countries’ supply of fertilizer.

The demand for old-fashioned molecules of oil, gas and petroleum byproducts is currently driving a highly lucrative flow of cash into the United States. But that is merely the short-term arbitrage of a dying economic model. The true strategic demand has shifted toward a vastly more sophisticated architecture of power: one based on atoms, electrons, and photons. We are moving away from the crude combustion of dead biology and toward the mastery of next-generation nuclear fission, the pursuit of nuclear fusion, the electron-orchestration that is the essence of digital computation, and the literal beaming of solar light into American power grids. Other Western countries are chasing wind and solar power, which are plagued by intermittency and are limited by battery manufacturing. America, however, is aiming to build baseload capacity fit for multiplying energy demand. In short, it is shooting for the stars.

The question is how long the new nuclear energy transition will take. People think it will take 30 years of regulatory red tape and $30 billion to build a new nuclear power plant. They missed a historic event on 15 February. Hardly any news media covered Operation Windlord, in which small modular reactors (SMRs), based on the reactors that have powered nuclear submarines for decades, were shipped on massive Globemaster C-17 aircraft from March Air Reserve Base, in California, to Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The reactors were then trucked to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation. This was the first-ever air transport of a nuclear microreactor, and therefore a milestone demonstration of deployability.

The Americans are envisioning a world where nuclear power is mobile, distributed, and available on demand any time and anywhere. These innovations are about delinking power from geography. While the legacy world bleeds over massive, vulnerable oil tankers, the atomic future runs on TRISO fuel pellets (tri-structural isotropic particle fuel) that are entirely meltdown-proof and produce zero emissions. This fuel cannot be easily weaponized, for the radioactive material is locked inside diamond-hard poppy-seed-sized ceramic shells. These shells cannot be melted down or easily broken apart, and if they could, it would kill the engineers doing it. The Department of Energy calls it “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth”. No pipelines required. Stars in a box.

Nuclear fusion, in theory an even more transformative source of power, is still derided as being perpetually “50 years away”. But the critics are looking at the wrong bottleneck. The constraint is no longer the atomic material. It is the vessel required to hold the plasma, and the hyper-precise attosecond lasers needed to pulse and manage the hydrogen isotopes: atoms rather than molecules. By doing millions of simulations in minutes, AI is collapsing the time needed to get to fusion. As new materials and AI advance, fusion is on course to become a reality. Not that it’s the only bet being placed by Washington: DARPA, the US military’s innovation unit, recently beamed 800 watts of power across 5.3 miles of open air using a directed laser. Just to flex the absolute audacity of their success, the scientists used the wirelessly transmitted energy to pop popcorn at the other end. Wireless energy transmission is no longer a sci-fi abstraction; it is a reality.

Look at the geopolitical board: Iran is bleeding its resources to control the old, flat molecule-driven economy, while the Artemis program aims to permanently free the US by shifting to the management of atoms, electrons and light. Conquering the cosmos requires abandoning archaic chemical rockets in favor of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Ultimately, it’s a tale of two paradigms: the Artemis generation is building an atomic architecture to entirely unshackle the global economy, while the regime in Tehran is desperately trying to keep a chokehold on the molecules that the global economy currently depends upon.

The US has been explicitly clear about this strategy, though the legacy pundits were too busy laughing at the President to notice. In late 2025, the State Department launched Pax Silica: a strategic framework declaring that if the 20th century ran on oil, steel, and vulnerable maritime chokepoints, the 21st century will run on compute, data, and critical minerals. It is the official, silicon-based replacement for Pax Americana. To physically build this new architecture, the Department of Energy unleashed the Genesis Mission. It is gathering the combined data, capabilities and technologies of the seventeen National Laboratories, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. The goal is to double American R&D output in just 10 years. To do it, Washington is executing a two-part strategy: handing the leading scientists exascale computing power, and allowing AI to access the massive, never-before-tapped vaults of the classified, proprietary data that has been generated by America’s top scientists since the Second World War. This will turn 80 years of compartmentalized and classified science into active training data, enabling scientists to optimize the design of nuclear reactors and discover new alloys that could eliminate foreign supply chain dependence entirely.

Those supply chains are a remnant of the era in which we were bound by what we could extract. We had to shape existing materials into what we needed. A tree, for example, could become a boat. Now we can create new realities by painting with electrons and by constructing new materials, atom by atom, that never existed before. This is how new “metamaterials”, as they are called, are being built. These are artificial structures engineered at the atomic level to bend the laws of physics. For example, instead of relying on natural chemistry, scientists can now build microscopic patterns of atoms and electrons that can manipulate light, radar, and sound, allowing them to construct stealth armor that bends radar around a fighter jet. Google has already discovered over 380,000 new materials and over two million new crystals this way thanks to its new Willow chip, which can be built via similar methods. Formulas are replacing materials. Abundance is replacing scarcity.

That scale of abundance will require a vast amount of energy — and Elon Musk isn’t waiting for SMRs and nuclear fission to supplement American power grids. To sustain his AI endeavors, Musk aims to produce one terawatt of compute (that is, computational power) annually — 50 times the current global capacity. Earth does not have the land, the cooling water, or the power grids to sustain that. So he is relocating intelligence to the heavens. Musk has just announced his plans to open the world’s largest semiconductor factory; 80% of its output is designed for orbital data centers linked by Starlink lasers. Google’s Project Suncatcher is following suit, launching solar-powered satellites designed to harvest orbital energy and beam it down alongside data. The strategy is ruthlessly simple: if the Earth cannot support the future, let the Old World to duke it out on the ground while America moves its economy into space.

The Artemis II mission marks the revitalization of America’s federal space program. (Reid Wiseman/NASA via Getty Images)

Empires are scavengers. We’ve fought brutal wars over mud, powering our civilizations by burning the molecular remains of long-dead biological matter. It was a subterranean era of power. But the Americans have stopped looking down at the old two-dimensional map of the world. By looking up, they are executing a Promethean shift: pulling the physical mechanics of the sun and the stars down to Earth and domesticating these empyrean forces. By packing the heavens into steel boxes, they are intending to power a literal “Golden Age” of human flourishing.

Pundits might laugh at the grandiosity, but they are forgetting the lessons of history. Before 1840, naval power was a hostage to the wind. The deadliest galleon was worthless once the breeze died. Then the British launched HMS Nemesis, the world’s first iron-hulled steam warship. By moving from sails to steam, Britain could power up shallow rivers, shocking military planners. Nemesis decoupled the power of the British Empire from what were thought to be the limits of nature. The Americans are simply doing it again, only this time with atoms instead of steam. Washington is merely reading from Britain’s old playbook.

The irony is that the British once possessed the exact ruthless foresight they are currently failing to recognize in the Americans. In 1911, the Royal Navy was the undisputed master of the seas, running entirely on domestic Welsh coal. It was safe, familiar, and utterly secure. But a young Winston Churchill recognized a brutal truth: comfort is the enemy of supremacy. To gain absolute speed and efficiency, he gambled the survival of the British Empire on the distant oil fields of Persia. In doing so, he helped save the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. It was, in essence, a battle between, on one side, bureaucrats and Welsh coal barons, who wanted to manage the mud they already owned; and, on the other, a visionary who was willing to trade certain security for absolute supremacy. Abandoning coal seemed madness, but Churchill was right.

Decades earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pulled off an even more audacious masterstroke. He saw that the new geopolitical map was not the open ocean — it was a narrow, yet unbuilt trench though Egypt. In 1875, while Parliament was in recess, Disraeli borrowed £4 million and bought the Suez Canal from a bankrupt Khedive. Disraeli didn’t just buy a canal; he secured the central artery of global power, and locked in a hundred years of naval dominance, even as his rivals were still squinting at the old map. Today, the US is doing the exact same thing with atoms and celestial compute — securing the new Suez before the Old World realizes the canal has moved. Washington is simply running Disraeli’s playbook, but in the stars instead of in the sand.

Some British entrepreneurs understand that a new era is upon us. Space Solar, a startup based in Oxfordshire, aims to beam continuous, clean energy directly from orbit to Earth. Wales-based Space Forge is currently proving that semiconductor manufacturing and in orbit refining is actually more efficient in the vacuum of space. Pulsar Fusion is making progress on the long road to fusion-powered rocketry, and it was Rolls-Royce ingenuity that created the modern SMR. Britain clearly possesses the intellectual capital to make a success of the atomic transition. Europe does too. But for now, they merely tinker on the edge of the three-dimensional map while the Americans aggressively claim the territory. The Chinese and the Saudis are also racing forward. Saudi is training a new generation of scientists at KAUST, its flagship science and technology university, and investing in a wide range of nuclear, solar and space technologies. China is on a par with the US. Others need to catch up.

The endless diplomatic handwringing over Iran’s exact proximity to a traditional nuclear warhead entirely misses the point; their capacity to create a dirty bomb was already a functional reality even if delivery on an ICBM was not. The intentions were clear. When Tehran, which had been negotiating with the US in Geneva earlier this year, finally abandoned the charade, the US delivered a kinetic reminder that its red lines were not suggestions. Iran’s retaliation was a brutal validation of the American thesis. Blindsiding neighbors like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Tehran demonstrated a terrifyingly precise strike capability, reaching as far as Diego Garcia. The regime also struck desalination plants, crucial to the region’s water supply. Washington successfully eliminated the men in charge, but the molecules remain trapped: oil, gas and especially H20, water. The attacks on desalination plants gave pause to everyone in the region. The chokepoints for water, oil, and natural gas outlived the leadership because the old world economy remains a captive in this geography. Trump offered Europe the only geopolitical strategy the Old World has left: take the molecules while you still can.

The grand, cosmic irony of the current crisis is America’s response to Iran’s nuclear threats. For decades, the West has been agitated by Tehran’s atomic ambitions. Yet the ultimate American counter-move to Iran’s nuclear threat isn’t just a barrage of conventional airstrikes; it is the mass deployment of next-generation nuclear power. It is a new grand strategy of nukes on nukes. How does the US neutralize a hostile regime holding ransom the world’s oil supply? By rapidly building a new nuclear power grid, thus removing Iran’s leverage, and by building a space-based missile defense system that can down incoming Iranian warheads. The US is answering the threat of nuclear extortion with the reality of nuclear emancipation. It does not matter if the stars in a box are not yet fully operational or if nuclear fusion doesn’t happen tomorrow. What’s important is to see the value of the Suez Canal, as Disraeli did, before it is built.

Even as they build the future, the architects of this transition are capable of bungling the present. Trump’s loose lips have offended Mohammed bin Salman and alienated the Qataris, causing the Gulf states to hedge their bets and perhaps to back away from Washington. These are clumsy and avoidable errors. The war in Iran will continue to be messy. Yet the American industrial machine will persist in its celestial pivot. China, having plundered American IP, is following, and so will others once the architecture is proven to work. They’ll soon realize that these historic technological pivots are not optional, whether from sail to steam, from coal to oil, from combustion to compute, or from molecules to atoms.

The fatal flaw of the transatlantic intelligentsia is that they confuse the man with the machine. One may thoroughly loathe Donald Trump, but translating distaste for his manner into an assumption of industrial weakness is geopolitical suicide. The American innovation engine does not care about European sensibilities. While the Old World is busy looking down at the old two-dimensional map, they must soon realize that they are hostage to waterways, muddy ditches, and dictators. Washington, meanwhile, is looking up. The American empire is exchanging molecules for atoms and straits for stars.

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• Market Performance: Samsung Electronics recently reported significant quarterly profit growth, bolstering investor confidence and causing share prices to recover following recent volatility.
• Technology Impact: Google's TurboQuant algorithm, designed to compress AI memory usage, initially sparked concerns regarding reduced demand for high-bandwidth memory chips.
• Efficiency Paradox: Analysts suggest that by lowering computational costs, TurboQuant may trigger the Jevons paradox, leading to increased overall demand for AI infrastructure and memory.
• Commercial Strategy: Major chip manufacturers are increasingly securing stable revenue by transitioning toward long-term supply contracts with AI service providers rather than relying on spot pricing.
• Development Status: While currently a theoretical research concept, the practical industry application of TurboQuant remains subject to wider evaluation and integration by large-scale tech enterprises.

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Shares of Samsung Electronics and South Korean rival SK Hynix fell sharply following the announcement of Google’s TurboQuant © FT montage/Getty Images

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current progress 70%

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Daniel Tudor in Seoul

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Samsung Electronics’ blowout first quarter has eased investor concerns that a new Google algorithm might threaten the AI-driven boom in South Korea’s memory chip industry.

Citing an “unprecedented supercycle” in the memory chip market, Samsung this week estimated higher profits in a single quarter than in the whole of last year, with no sign that memory was becoming less of a bottleneck for AI companies.

The earnings guidance sent Samsung shares close to all-time highs and eased two weeks of anxiety sparked by TurboQuant, a technology outlined in a Google Research blog post in late March, which promises to drastically reduce the amount of memory required for AI.

The post ignited a fierce and ongoing debate about future demand for high-bandwidth memory, the advanced chips made by Samsung and its South Korean rival SK Hynix that power AI servers.

Some investors believe the memory boom will turn to bust, others think TurboQuant will have little impact, while optimists argue that if the technology does make AI cheaper, it will simply create demand for even more AI, and thus more chips.

TurboQuant “potentially slashes the cost of running large language models by a factor of four to eight”, said Kwon Seok-joon, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. “At first glance, this appears to threaten demand for high-bandwidth memory chips.”

However, “dramatically cheaper inference unlocks workloads previously too expensive to run”, such as real-time coding assistants and multiple AI agents running at the same time, added Kwon, “driving total compute demand higher, not lower”.

TurboQuant works by compressing the so-called key value cache — the short-term memory that allows AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude to retain conversational context — and reconstructing it when needed, with little apparent loss in accuracy.

As AI interactions lengthen and user numbers rise, demands on the KV cache are surging, putting strain on how much memory AI services can afford to use.

TurboQuant offers a way out, reducing the “cost per token”, the amount of computing and memory expense required to process each unit of data handled by an AI system. Google’s researchers claim the approach could cut memory usage by as much as sixfold.

The blog post caused shares of Samsung and SK Hynix to fall sharply last month. But analysts and researchers now suggest that if TurboQuant does work, it is more likely to expand overall memory demand than reduce it — an example of the Jevons paradox, in which greater efficiency increases overall usage of a resource.

Economist William Stanley Jevons noted in his 1865 book The Coal Question that James Watt’s more efficient steam engine had resulted in greater usage of the fuel because it made coal-powered technologies economically viable in far more contexts.

Han In-su, one of the researchers upon whose work TurboQuant is based, told the FT that the algorithm “can serve as a foundation for realising previously impossible high-difficulty tasks, such as processing much longer contexts within limited memory resources without sacrificing accuracy, or implementing high-performance AI on smaller devices”.

In a research note, Kim Young-gun of Mirae Asset Securities invoked “déjà vu” over Kubernetes, a Google-designed “containerisation” technology that made it possible to run multiple applications on a single server, greatly improving hardware efficiency.

Upon its widespread adoption in the late 2010s, there were concerns that demand for servers and memory would fall as companies would need fewer resources to produce the same results. In practice, the opposite occurred, with lower costs encouraging much greater usage.

“The market has largely misread TurboQuant,” said Ray Wang of research firm SemiAnalysis. “We continue to believe that increasing memory demand will be required for both training and inference as AI models evolve and innovation advances.”

Any potential blow to the South Korean chipmakers would be cushioned by the increasing use of long-term contracts from AI service providers seeking to lock in supply, said Wang.

“Memory is becoming a bit less cyclical, driven by accelerating and sustainable AI demand,” he said. “Contract pricing now matters more than spot pricing.”

At Samsung’s annual meeting last month, co-chief executive Jun Young-hyun said the company was pursuing “contracts of three or five years with major clients, shifting from the existing quarterly and annual terms”.

For now, TurboQuant remains a concept in a blog post. Its real-world impact will become clear after it is presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Brazil in late April and people outside Google are expected to be able to test it. Its ultimate success will depend on whether the largest tech groups are able to use it at scale.

“We never imagined that a technology that started from the academic question of ‘How can we compress data more perfectly?’ would cause such a huge social and economic ripple effect,” said Han.

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• Bone Health Context: Emerging concerns regarding increased rates of osteoporosis and osteomalacia are linked to overall weight loss rather than a direct negative pharmacological effect on bone mineral density.
• Debunking Misconceptions: Clinical reports and ongoing investigations have failed to substantiate viral social media claims that GLP-1 medications directly induce muscle wasting or increase suicidal ideation.
• Verified Side Effects: While common myths have been disproven, documented risks include gastrointestinal issues and a rare but validated potential link to specific eye conditions.
• Methodological Caution: Preliminary studies cited in viral misinformation often lack peer review and are frequently misrepresented or decoupled from legitimate scientific context by non-experts.
• Risk Benefit Evaluation: Medical consensus emphasizes that therapeutic efficacy for conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes is maintained when clinicians monitor patients for known, evidence-based risks.

---

Every drug comes with its trade-offs, including blockbuster weight loss medications like semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic) and other GLP-1s. To hear the internet tell it, though, GLP-1s are basically rotting users from the inside out.

Myths and misconceptions about GLP-1 drugs have grown rampant on social media as of late. The drugs are supposedly doing everything from wasting away bones to destroying people’s sense of joy. These myths aren’t flatly wrong, though—they’re a distraction from the nuanced conversations we should be having about these important but far from miraculous therapies.

No, Ozempic is not shredding bones

The latest iteration of GLP-1 misinformation revolves around bones.

People are claiming on social media that the drugs can commonly “shred” bone, based on a misreading of a real, if preliminary, study. The research, presented last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, found that GLP-1 use was associated with higher rates of osteoporosis (bone weakening) and osteomalacia (bone softening).

Leaving aside that this study hasn’t yet gone through the typical peer review process, there’s some very important context here. For starters, the absolute rates of osteoporosis and osteomalacia were low, even in the GLP-1 group (4.1% and 2%, respectively). And other research has suggested that the increase in these risks comes from the weight people lose while taking a GLP-1, rather than the drug directly.

The viral image accompanying the latest meme about Ozempic’s harms. © Lukathor/X

Even the study researchers themselves don’t call for people to abandon their GLP-1s. Instead, they argue that doctors should monitor the bone health of users at higher risk of these complications, since there are easy things you can do to prevent them proactively, like taking more vitamin D and calcium or strength training. Interestingly enough, a separate study presented at the same conference found that GLP-1 use might reduce the risk of post-operative side effects in people undergoing common orthopedic surgeries.

Oh, and the viral image attached to this latest bit of fearmongering (seen above)? No idea where it’s actually from, but it has squat to do with the study.

Other kinds of misfortune blamed on GLP-1s are based on even more flimsy evidence. As Gizmodo has covered before, for instance, there’s next to little data supporting that these drugs are sapping people’s muscles. People will lose some lean body mass when losing weight, no matter how it’s done. And as with our bones, you can take steps to mitigate potential muscle loss if you’re really worried about it, such as increasing your protein intake.

Other zombie GLP-1 myths linger despite most relevant research having refuted it.

It’s true, for instance, that some health agencies were worried about Wegovy increasing people’s suicide ideation soon after it hit the market in 2021. However, these agencies investigated the matter more extensively and ultimately found no connection. A study published just this month found that semaglutide use was actually associated with a lower risk of worsening depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders.

Risks and benefits

To be clear, this isn’t me saying GLP-1s are all reward and no risk.

These drugs very commonly cause unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects, though you can take steps to mitigate them. And while scientists are constantly finding new potential health benefits of GLP-1s, they’re finding new possible risks, too.

Several studies have shown that GLP-1s can increase the odds of certain eye conditions, for instance. While the overall risk of these eye issues seems to be very rare, it’s still vital to know about that risk so doctors and patients can prevent or treat them appropriately. And this might not be the last unpleasant surprise we learn about GLP-1s, if history is any teacher.

There isn’t really a free lunch in medicine. Most anything that can positively change the body can sometimes backfire in ways we do and don’t expect. Even my regular jogs have occasionally resulted in me spraining my ankle or coming home with scrapes and bruises from an accidental fall.

The Link Between GLP-1 Drugs and Thyroid Cancer Could Be Smoke and Mirrors

A drug works when its benefits outweigh the risks on average for the people who most need it. So far, that has proven abundantly true for those taking GLP-1 therapy to treat their type 2 diabetes, obesity, and maybe someday, their substance use disorder or other form of addiction.

It’s always important to understand the benefits and risks of any medical treatment and for people (ideally with the help of their doctors) to decide for themselves whether the former merits taking on the latter. That’s harder to do when the internet is rife with misinformation about the most well-known drugs this side of Viagra. So as annoying as it is to see undying memes about Ozempic sucking away people’s skeletons or whatnot, it remains worthwhile to debunk them.

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• Scientific Exploration Goals: Current lunar initiatives focus on conducting geological surveys and gathering data to identify local mineral resources rather than immediate industrial extraction.
• Technological Hurdles: Developing reliable mining operations remains constrained by high energy demands, harsh thermal environments, and the physical challenges posed by abrasive lunar dust.
• Potential Resource Utilization: Researchers are investigating the extraction of water ice, helium-3, and metals to provide life support, fuel for propulsion, and material for deep-space transit.
• Environmental Protection Concerns: Experts emphasize the need for rigorous assessments to prevent irreversible damage to the lunar surface and potential long-term impacts on Earth's night sky ecosystems.
• Legal Framework Ambiguities: While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits national sovereignty claims, international law lacks explicit regulations addressing commercial mining or conflict resolution among private corporate entities.

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Since Neil Armstrong took his giant step for mankind onto the Moon almost 60 years ago, small samples from the lunar surface have been brought back to Earth.

The samples provide a glimpse into what minerals are in the lunar regolith and missions such as Artemis II provide greater understanding of the Moon's environment.

As technology advances amid the race to send people to Mars, scientists and corporations are exploring how the Moon can be mined.

Here is a breakdown of some of the physical, environmental, legal and ethical challenges involved in Moon mining, according to a scientist, an engineer, a lawyer and an archaeologist.

First steps for extracting resources

Machines such as NASA's RASSOR (Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot) are being tested for suitability to use on the Moon. (NASA)

CSIRO Mineral Resources senior principal research scientist Jonathon Ralston has been involved in developing mining technology for the Moon and Mars.

He says the first step is to gain an understanding of the environment in a similar way to how prospecting and exploration digs are conducted before resource extraction on Earth.

"And the exciting thing is we've been there a couple of times with the Apollo missions but there's so much more to learn about the Moon and there's a lot of unknown uncertainties," Dr Ralston said.

"When people use this term 'mining on the Moon', it's really much more closer to scientific exploration to understand what the local resources are there first before we can then start doing exciting things."

Sophia Casanova says there is a long way to go before mining on the Moon is possible. (Supplied)

Sophia Casanova is an Australian scientist based in Europe who designs surface missions for ispace, a private company that aims to transport payloads to the Moon or lunar orbit.

She said the technology that would enable mining on the Moon was still in its infancy, though companies were sending small components of the eventual process chain into space.

The CSIRO has a lab to test rovers for use on the Moon's surface. (Supplied: CSIRO)

Looking for ground truth

In 2019, 50 years after the first Apollo mission landed on the Moon, NASA re-examined its lunar samples.

"They've been studied extensively to understand what the actual materials are and there's been a lot of work with people then basically creating analogues of those materials so they could do testing here on Earth," Dr Ralston said.

Listen to our daily Artemis II mission updates on the Artemis Explained podcast.

"The other aspect is there's been lots of orbital satellite technologies scanning the Moon for its composition. But what we're really looking for now is that ground truth.

"We want to have more ground-based missions that can do that calibration, and validation techniques so we can really understand what the material is in the moon, both on the surface and the subsurface, so that we can then make good decisions about what ways might we best make use of those resources to basically support mission activities."

Minerals in the regolith

Analysis of the lunar regolith has shown it is made up of about 50 per cent silica, along with a range of trace metals and other minerals.

Some missions have identified ice in regions on the Moon that are never touched by the Sun.

"There's a very, very excited group of people with the prospect of basically water ice on the Moon, which is a fantastic resource that could be utilised for both life support and also propulsion systems for the hydrogen and the oxygen as well," Dr Ralston said.

NASA estimates there are a million tonnes of helium-3 — an isotope rare on Earth — on the Moon.

Rare earth metals, which are used in smartphones, computers and advanced technologies, are also present on the Moon, including scandium, yttrium and the 15 lanthanides, according to research by Boeing.

A private company based in Seattle, Interlune, is aiming to be the first US company to commercialise resources from space, starting with helium-3 from the Moon.

Helium-3 is used as a coolant, including in cryogenics, making it useful for data storage.

Dr Ralston said opinion was divided on whether helium-3 was present in a high enough concentration and that the big challenge would be developing methods to recover it and transport it back to Earth.

ispace is testing rovers for use on the Moon's surface. (ispace)

Dr Casanova said a lot of the focus was on understanding what the environment was like on the lunar south pole.

"So it's still quite a way off from any sort of extraction-level processes or big processes," she said.

"The technologies are very small demonstrations. We're still very constrained by the power and energy that's required for these technologies and the harshness of the space environment."

One of the other major minerals on the lunar surface is ilmenite, which is very rich in oxygen. There are also metals, including iron and titanium, that could be extracted.

A petrol station in space?

When people refer to resource extraction on the Moon, they generally do not mean to say that the materials would be brought back to Earth, but rather would be used in space.

Water is important because it can be separated into its components — hydrogen and oxygen — which can then be used as propellant or fuel for spacecraft.

"Essentially a petrol-station-in-space kind of concept — and a necessary one if we're looking [at] sending humans to Mars or for deeper space operations in the long-term," Dr Casanova said.

The lunar surface was a very challenging environment to operate in, Dr Casanova said, due to massive swings in temperature, and the material itself posed design challenges.

"The regolith material itself is very sharp, abrasive, and kicks up a lot of dust, which can interfere with the engineering design of all the functionality of the rovers," she said.

Rovers — remote-controlled vehicles designed to travel on the Moon's surface — have gathered information to help scientists better understand how to address the complexities of operating in such a harsh environment.

Dr Casanova said there were a lot of technological advances needed before any significant mining could be carried out on the Moon.

"There's a lot of challenges when it comes to resource-specific questions and technologies, because these technologies that we use on Earth, they're big, they're heavy, they're power-hungry, they can be less precise and they're not as constrained," she said.

The Artemis II mission is expected to further scientific knowledge. (NASA: Brandon Hancock)

Protecting the Moon

Space archaeologist Alice Gorman has been working on how to protect the lunar environment.

She said there had been increasing interest in resource extraction from the Moon.

"It's unfortunately a little bit similar to the Cold War space race," Dr Gorman said.

"There's an amount of national prestige involved in sending a surface mission and in successfully getting data or demonstrating that you're a little bit closer to lunar mining.

"A lot of the motivations for going to the Moon to mine are not actually about the ability to use resources or a commitment to lunar science.

"One of the concerns is that commercial operations will actually destroy the science that needs to be carried out."

She said it was paramount to have a thorough understanding of the impacts resource extraction would have on the Moon to prevent it from being irreversibly harmed.

"On Earth we're used to environments renewing themselves, bouncing back," Dr Gorman said.

"You can still cause incredible environmental harm, but we also have a sort of faith that rivers will keep flowing, vegetation will grow back and ecosystems can recover.

"But on the Moon it's not like that — processes are completely different, they happen at different timescales and we don't understand what are the longer-term impacts of moving lunar dust.

"One thing a number of lunar scientists have agreed is that it would be possible to move enough dust up into orbit around the moon, so there would be a dust cloud around the Moon."

If that happened, it could have catastrophic consequences for animals on Earth that depend on moonlight, such as some species of owl and marine turtles, she said.

The Artemis II crew took this photograph of the Moon's Vavilov Crater. (NASA)

Dr Casanova and Dr Ralston agree that lunar mining will be different to terrestrial mining and that caution is needed.

"When we talk about extracting resources on the Moon, it's not big trucks that are just picking up rock — we have to be very careful with this environment, so there will not be big coal trucks kicking up material and dust and everything," Dr Casanova said.

"There will be very precise movements, very precise activities to extract these resources, very little disturbance."

From the Moon to Mars

Mining on Earth almost always involves large amounts of water and energy.

But on the Moon there is no carbon and no liquid water.

"The very challenges that we need to address to do processing of resources on the Moon are exactly the kind of technologies we also need here right on Earth as well," Dr Ralston said.

Dr Casanova said mining on the Moon involved the resources themselves, which could potentially be used to support ships travelling between Earth and Mars, the creation of new technology and learning how to live away from Earth.

"Being able to develop and operate in an environment that, although not completely analogous to Mars, has many similar constraints in terms of power, communications, living in an atmosphere-free environment without breathable oxygen," she said.

Dr Casanova said the Moon would be a testing ground before humans progressed to Mars.

Legal and sovereignty issues

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, developed by the United Nations and signed by the US, Russia and the UK, has nine main principles, including that the Moon be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.

It also states that outer space not be "subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means".

There is also a clause stipulating that all areas of the Moon should be accessible to everyone.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says all areas of the Moon should be accessible to everyone. (NASA)

But Dr Gorman said there were untested areas of ambiguity — for example, exclusion zones around mining areas.

"And of course there could be commercial in-confidence operations going on because there's this huge emphasis now on private corporations and commercial operations for profit as a way to finance the science," she said.

Dr Gorman said it was unclear how mining on the Moon meshed with the Outer Space Treaty.

Unlike in Australia, where there are laws governing mineral exploration and extraction, there are no explicit laws in place regarding the Moon because no nation has sovereignty over it.

"There's a lot of Moon and there's a lot of south pole, so it would be possible for numerous nations or companies to be carrying out resource extraction and not ever overlap or come into conflict with each other," Dr Gorman said.

"But what happens if they do? And what happens if the area somebody wants to mine is also one that scientists would like to preserve for future study?"

The UN developed a Moon Treaty in 1979.

But space lawyer Gregory Radisic said only 18 countries had ratified it and none of them had actually landed on the Moon.

"If you don't have a rocket ship and you can't go there, then that's fine, you can sign anything you want, but you're not really part of the party," he said.

Mr Radisic, who is a fellow at For All Moonkind, a not-for-profit organisation that advocates for protection and the development of laws in space, explained that countries, including the US and the former USSR, agreed to a principle of non-appropriation during the 1960s.

"It is basically a legal doctrine saying no-one can own land on the Moon or any celestial body," he said.

"But then you had all these Apollo missions, where it's almost like mining was happening under the guise of scientific exploration and research, bringing back rock samples."

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has a working group drafting legal aspects of space resource activities, but even if countries sign up to the recommended principles, once they are finalised, they are non-binding.

The draft principles include environmental assessments before any resource extraction, avoiding adverse changes to Earth and the harmful contamination of the Moon.

But given that much of the space race is being led by tech billionaires who tend to follow the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things", it is unclear what would happen if private companies decided to ignore the draft principles, though they do put the onus on nations to take responsibility.

NASA's ISRU Pilot Excavator (IPEx) performs a simulated lunar mission in a testbed at the Kennedy Space Center. (NASA: Frank Micheaux)

"It's a fairly common opinion that the space barons or the space billionaires aren't best placed to judge the ethical issues around lunar mining," Dr Gorman said.

"When governments carry out these exercises, they are accountable to the public but private corporations are not."

Space barons and billionaires

NASA and other space agencies are outsourcing a lot of their projects to private actors, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin.

Dr Gorman said she was concerned about what that could mean for the future of the Moon.

"Your average space billionaire probably doesn't give a rat's arse about future generations," she said.

"Elon Musk has set his sights on Mars, so are we going to sacrifice the Moon so that some of these space billionaires can conquer Mars in that old sort of colonialist way?"

In January, NASA and the US Department of Energy announced a renewed commitment to support the research and development of a nuclear fission surface power system for use on the Moon via the Artemis campaign and future missions to Mars.

Russia also plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade in order to supply its lunar space program and a joint Russian–Chinese research station.

International rules ban putting nuclear weapons in space but there are no bans on nuclear energy sources.

Mr Radisic said it was important to consider what impacts construction on the Moon might have back on Earth.

"Imagine you see a new moon and all of a sudden there's a light flickering back at you," he said.

"Even just from that cultural perspective, how does that change every child's perspective of outer space once that starts happening?

"Same with heritage — what if we land a craft and all of a sudden Neil Armstrong's first bootprint on the Moon is wiped away?

"How devastating would that be for humanity? Just so we can have a power source?"

• Geological Refuge Strategy: Microbes may have relocated to subterranean environments like lava tubes, groundwater caches, or fissures to escape the uninhabitable surface conditions of Mars.
• Dormancy Survival Mechanism: Organisms could potentially persist through harsh climate eras by entering spore or cyst states, reactivating only when liquid water conditions emerge.
• Hygroscopic Salt Utilization: Similar to extremophiles in the Atacama Desert, Martian life might inhabit salt crusts that draw moisture directly from the atmosphere via deliquescence.
• Alternative Biological Solvents: Biological systems on the planet might utilize substances like hydrogen peroxide-water mixtures instead of standard saline, enabling cellular function in extreme cold without freezing damage.
• Evolutionary Adaptation Limits: Scientific investigation continues regarding whether Martian organisms could independently develop complex survival strategies unseen on Earth or thrive in hypersaline, low-moisture environments.

---

With the latest detection of organic compounds by the Curiosity rover, the case for past life on Mars becomes stronger than ever, as suggested in a recent paper by Alexander Pavlov in the journal Astrobiology. And that lends additional credence to an even more exciting idea — that living organisms may still exist on Mars today.

If that’s true, what form should we expect them to take? And where should we search for them? The planet’s surface is a brutal environment for any known type of organism, with huge temperature swings (from approximately -150 °C to 25 °C), virtually no water, and high doses of radiation. Yet we know from our own planet how resilient and adaptive life can be. Besides, this hostile environment didn’t always exist on Mars.

So if life once thrived on the Red Planet, where did it go?

Option 1: Retreat!

We know from half a century of robotic Mars exploration that the planet once had watery environments similar to those on Earth’s surface, probably including shallow lakes, streams, and deeper-water seas. It may even have had hydrothermal vents similar to those found in our deep oceans, which may have been where life originated on Earth. With all that water, microbial life could have become well established before climate change made the surface uninhabitable. As the planet got colder and drier, any microbes might have retreated into isolated niches, such as groundwater beneath the permafrost or underground lava tubes, fractures, fissures, and caves. Or they may have migrated to areas where the ground was warmer, like the volcanic provinces of Arabia Terra.

Option 2: Go dormant 

While the evolutionary history of Mars is still to some degree uncertain, it seems clear that the planet has had long dry and cold stretches interspersed with warmer and wetter periods that extended almost up to the present era. On Earth, a common adaptive strategy for surviving temporarily inhospitable conditions is dormancy. Dormant microbial states, such as the spores or cysts we find in cold environments like Antarctica, may have allowed Martian organisms to tough it out through harsh conditions until the environment became hospitable again. The big question here is whether evolution on Mars would have progressed far enough to develop dormancy as a strategy. It’s unknown when spores first appeared on Earth — fossilized spores are notoriously difficult to identify, so the fossil record isn’t much help.

Life could potentially bloom and reproduce at a high rate during periods when liquid water reappears on the surface.

Because early Earth environments could also have been inhospitable, it seems likely that dormancy developed early in our planet’s history. On the other hand, spores and similar dormancy states are quite complex to achieve. They require a complex genetic development program, and so would not be expected to be among the first adaptations that life tried in order to survive environmental change.

Let’s imagine that dormant life has persisted on Mars up until modern times. It could potentially bloom and reproduce at a high rate during periods when liquid water reappears on the surface, not unlike what happens in hyperarid deserts on Earth. Wetter periods could result from flooding triggered by episodic volcanism and meteor bombardment, or from snow or ice melt. Even so, Martian organisms would still be expected to spend most of their lives in the spore state, as inhospitable conditions would last for very long stretches of time. 

Option 3: Hide under a rock

Based on the ecological adaptations we see in desert ecosystems on Earth, there is a pattern of changes that comes with increasing dryness. The last refuge for surface life in places like the Atacama Desert of Chile is inside salt crusts that are hygroscopic, meaning they draw water directly from the atmosphere. (Think how salt gets clumpy if you leave it in humid air for too long.) This effect becomes very pronounced in hyperarid environments like the Atacama, and could also work for life on Mars. Some microbes on Earth don’t need any other source of water to persist and grow. If the salty rock absorbs so much moisture that some of it dissolves and forms a solution, the process is called deliquescence. This is how terrestrial microbes survive in places where it may rain only once in a decade, like in the Atacama. In theory, the same thing could happen on Mars.  

Option 4: Some strategy unknown to us

Data from radar sounding experiments on Mars orbital missions suggest that underground lakes or pockets of groundwater may exist tens of meters below the surface of Mars. If true, these would likely be concentrated mixtures of water with chloride or perchlorate, given the temperature-depth profile. The question then arises whether life could thrive in these types of very concentrated brines. Experiments done with Debaryomyces hansenii, a microbe known to be very tolerant of perchlorate, showed that it could still grow at concentrations of 2.5 mol/kilogram. That’s high, but still far from the nearly saturated solution we might expect in the Martian subsurface. Salt solutions that stay liquid under those conditions, like magnesium chloride or calcium perchloride, are toxic to life. Could Martian organisms, if they exist, adapt to this kind of environment over many generations of evolutionary change?

They’d also need to be able to thrive in places much drier than any known on Earth — or, to use a more technical criterion, environments with very low “water activity.” The absolute lowest level of water activity for life on Earth to thrive seems to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.6.  However, while the overall water activity measured at any particular location might be unacceptably low, water may still be available on a microscopic level. For example, a study led by Rainer Meckenstock discovered minuscule water droplets in a lake of liquid asphalt that, surprisingly, contained bacterial communities — even when water activity in the lake as a whole measured 0.49. On Mars, if water activity were to fluctuate over the daily cycle, microbes could go dormant when it falls below a certain threshold level, then become active again when it rises.

Or maybe Martian organisms can thrive at much lower water activity levels than we find on Earth. We don’t know. The problem is that they’d have to be able to survive in highly changeable conditions in Earth’s deserts, from bone-dry to drenched. Even in the most arid deserts on Earth, there are extreme rain events when a lot of water suddenly becomes available. In one reported case, a downpour in the Atacama killed off more than 80% of bacterial species that were perfectly happy under normal dry conditions. The rain effectively drowned them. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Martian dunes, captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Natural selection on Mars may not have had to contend with such wild swings, and “double adaptation” may only be a problem on Earth, according to Janusz Petrowski at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology in Poland. On planets that are always reliably dry, things may go easier, evolutionarily speaking. Recent experiments show that minute amounts of water are clearly sufficient for some microbial species. Even with no standing water, they may be able to use groundwater-derived water vapor, hydrated minerals, or water capture during metabolism.  

On Earth, water serves another important biological purpose. Microbes use salt water as their intracellular fluid, while humans use a compound with similar properties — blood — for a variety of purposes (which explains why we get IVs with salt water). On Mars, with its extremely low temperatures, a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water may be more useful than saltwater.

In fact, as Joop Houtkooper and I pointed out in a 2007 paper, hydrogen peroxide has several advantages on Mars: mixed with water, it can stay liquid at temperatures down to -56 oC. It doesn’t form ice crystals when turning solid (which could pierce cell membranes), and is hygroscopic. The idea of hydrogen peroxide inside cells may sound preposterous at first, since that’s the stuff we use as cleaning agents to sterilize surfaces. Not so fast, though: Certain microbes are known to produce hydrogen peroxide in our mouths, and the Bombardier beetle has a 25% hydrogen peroxide-water mixture in its posterior chamber. In other words, hydrogen peroxide can be consistent with biology, which, incidentally, relates to why the Viking life detection experiments of the 1970s were so puzzling. 

In trying to imagine how life on Mars could have developed and survived, it’s time to take full advantage of the last half-century of progress in biological and planetary science. As Mars exploration advances — a planned Chinese Mars sample return mission may be the next major step, as NASA’s own plans for a sample return mission have faltered — we might get a new understanding of all that biochemistry can do.