Original subtitles

Previously on Mars.

When you believe in a goal the way we believed

in Mars, conviction alone will sustain you through

almost any test.

Robert!

If you find evidence of a second genesis.

Evolution can begin again.

I've got faith.

You know, I used to stand in the doorway

of the farmhouse where I grew up looking at all of the

crops, thinking about all the people they'd feed.

If you push too hard too fast,

something's gonna break.

If they fail, everyone's out.

But faith doesn't guarantee success.

Without plants we're nothing.

The real test is what happens when you fail.

Richardson, Leslie.

Phase 2, personal entry.

Damn tragedy.

God.

The entire west section is destroyed.

Paul was always late.

He would get so caught up in his work that he would

just lose time, completely forget about it.

And then he would show up hours later, filthy,

like a kid that had been playing out in the

mud all day.

And always with that look on his face,

that look as if he knew that he was in trouble.

But it was all worth it.

There was this one night I remember,

It was while we were living out in South America,

he was still in the forest collecting samples.

He was late, as usual.

But somehow it was different.

Morning came.

Another day went by.

Finally I could hear his footsteps approaching.

So, I rushed out to meet him.

And all of the sudden all of that fear and worry that I'd

felt turned into anger, rage.

I couldn't believe how selfish he'd been.

And then he appeared.

Victor.

There he is.

Covered from top to bottom in mud.

With that look on his face...

that look.

And all I could say was,

"I love you."

Without plants we're nothing.

We are not nothing, my friend.

We'd lost seven of our own.

The lab and the greenhouse were destroyed.

Olympus Town was on complete lock down until the nations of

the IMSF decided on the fate of our mission.

Was Mars going to be a giant leap forward,

or just a passing novelty.

It wasn't the first time humankind had

faced this question.

We accomplished the impossible by

stepping on the Moon.

This was, the first hop.

And there would be a skip, and a jump afterwards.

And we'd keep going and going and going,

and the future would be one of endless possibilities,

where the Cosmos was ours.

What do you think about this Moon landing?

Well it's the beginning of a new frontier,

a gateway to Mars.

That came to a very abrupt halt.

A major turning point for Apollo was

the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

Alright Houston, we've got a problem.

There is a bulletin from ABC news.

The Apollo 13 spacecraft has had a serious

power supply malfunction.

A late report says the spacecraft now is operating

on battery power alone, all unnecessary equipment

is being turned off.

Let's everybody keep cool.

Let's not make it any worse by guessing.

We came close to losing astronauts.

And it scared the living daylights out

of lots of people.

And some leaders at NASA said we gotta stop this.

This is too risky.

We all lived through that in real time.

We were all wrapped up with the fate of the astronauts.

It was a close call to get them back and that

really spooked Nixon.

It soured him on the notion of sending humans away

from Earth into deep space.

So it was a catalytic turning point in attitudes

towards space exploration.

Jack and Fred and I are very proud and

glad to be back here in Texas tonight.

There were times when we really didn't think that

we'd make it back here.

After the anomaly on 13,

I thought that our space exploration would

continue to go.

But the extreme rate of progress slowed down.

Apollo was this massive promise

of what was going to be going on, right?

We were going to the Moon, not to stop.

There were plans beyond the Moon but all this got killed

as the political will petered out and was gone.

On a Mars mission there may be some loss

of life in the process, there may be failures along

the road, but people will take it on.

One of the things that you have to ask is: 'Are the rest of

us willing to allow them to do that?'

Space exploration is subject to public opinion,

and political support.

There's no question about that.

If you send astronauts to Mars and they die there,

I guarantee you, public opinion will prohibit you from

ever doing it again.

As we buried our friends,

the fate of the mission was back on Earth in the hands of

my sister and the IMSF.

Hi Ed.

How long until we know?

I told the press everything I know;

The nations are meeting to discuss how to proceed and

then we'll make an official announcement.

You can't let them give up.

You just can't.

They knew something like this was a possibility, we all did.

Seven of the world's most beloved

scientists and astronauts are dead.

Does that mean anything to you?

Of course it means something to me.

What are you talking about?

It's a time to be strong, to make a statement that says

we're here to stay.

You're not going to influence my recommendation

to the committee.

We've come too far Joon.

If the train is derailing,

there's nothing I can do to keep it on the tracks.

The nations respect you,

they will listen to you;

You can inspire them to stay the course.

Even if we can Ed,

I'm not sure that we should.

What?

I'm not sure that we should.

Me, I'm sure of one thing.

I won't let go.

Dreamers of space have always had

their eyes, their hopes, their aspirations,

on getting to Mars.

Mars has been the goal since.

Wernher Von Braun got involved with NASA.

Liftoff, we have a liftoff!

Von Braun overbuilt entirely the rocket

to go to the Moon.

Saturn 5 is the largest, longest,

and heaviest machine ever built by humans.

It's absolute overkill for going to the Moon.

And the reason is, Von Braun didn't wanna go to the Moon.

He wanted to go to Mars.

The only reason he got involved in rocketry was

because ever since he's a little kid,

he's focused on this idea of getting to Mars.

He invented the V2 rocket when he was in

his late twenties and it was the first thing

that ever went into space from Earth.

Von Braun surrenders to US forces.

He and his fellow rocket scientists actually welcomed

by the Americans.

After the war,

he writes a book called 'das Marsprojekt',

which is basically a manual on how to build a fleet of

ships that can get to Mars and get humans back.

He's worked out all the equations, all the details,

of how it could actually be done.

And it captured the mind of the world.

Nobody was thinking about going to the Moon;

They were all imagining going to Mars.

This closes a golden chapter in the age

of space exploration.

At the end of the Apollo program,

NASA's beginning to lose its focus:

What do we do next?

And there are two proposals on Richard Nixon's desk.

One proposal is that we build a spaceplane,

called the Space Shuttle.

The other proposal was from Von Braun and he was

really storming the halls of Congress,

to say that we can go to Mars.

When would you see a man on Mars?

We could land a man on Mars in

a little over 10 years if we really wanted to do it.

Richard Nixon was never that

big of a supporter of the space program.

He came in wanting to cut the budget to lower taxes,

and space just was not a high priority

for that administration.

Basically they just wanted fewer leaps for mankind, right?

Small steps, small steps.

So Nixon chooses the Space Shuttle

over going to Mars.

Von Braun quits NASA, and within a few years

has cancer and dies.

It must have taken a great deal of

determination to carry on and, in view of some the

early failures that you've had.

Well, yes you just have to,

shouldn't give up. It's very simple,

something blows in your face,

try again, try again, try again.

One fine day you'll wind up on top.

After the devastation to the west section

we needed to scavenge from our other resources to rebuild,

even the old workshop.

Figure we use the housings to patch

the corridor the best we can.

If we can get the section sealed with scrap,

my team can start working on the damage done

to Olympus Town.

Javier!

What?

Ven mira.

Que, what is that,

corrosion?

It looks like, aragonite crystal.

Possible the metal catalyzed

perculate carried by the storm?

Unless something reacted with the

water that came out of the condensation filter.

It would be nice if I had a lab.

It's getting dark.

Let's get out of here.

Phobos and Deimos.

Fear and terror,

good names for the Moons of Mars.

We lost two of our finest cosmonauts

to this catastrophe;

The support of the Russian people is fading.

We've known this since Apollo:

Once the novelty passes, so does public support,

and no one ever died on the Moon.

Is this not the time to make a statement

that we're here to stay?

We have committed resources, delivered speeches.

Giving up now could be a great embarrassment.

More embarrassing than

another tragedy?

We only accepted the risk in the 60s because it was a

matter of national defense.

People love space,

but not when it means watching heroes die.

Secretary Seung,

you are as personally invested as any of us.

I would like to hear your recommendation to the committee.

May I?

I'm so sorry.

Paul was my responsibility.

We don't need to do this.

They all were.

You didn't kill them and

neither did Paul.

And neither did you.

I gave that order, not you.

We didn't have a choice Leslie.

Paul was right in front of me

and I didn't see him.

If we have any chance in this place

we need you with us.

Hana...

they asked me to make a choice,

whether to keep pushing, or to bring you home.

I tried to go back to that feeling,

that feeling we had,

staring up at those stars imagining what was beyond.

Unnie, do you remember that recurring dream

I used to have?

Walking along the regolith under the twin Moons before

I even knew it was Mars I was dreaming about.

When I think about you up there,

if it had been you in that corridor...

If it had been me in that corridor,

I only hope someone else would have done the same.

This mission, it's bigger than all of us.

I've made my peace, and I'd do it again if I have to.

That dream I used to have about Mars.

I could never tell Mom why I would wake up

crying every time.

It wasn't because it was a nightmare.

It was because the dream was over.

Hana, I told them to bring you home.

I'm going to make a public announcement next week.

I'm sorry.

The mission had failed,

I'd failed the crew, I failed Ben.

Man, this reminds me of a place I used

to go with my father when I was a kid.

So beautiful.

Yeah.

You know, they can give us a rover;

Put us in EVA suits,

but that blue sky, gonna miss that.

There's really no way of knowing if we actually make it

up there, is there?

Nope, but...

What good would we be if we didn't even try?

Let's get moving.

The tragedy, for me, of the shuttle...

it was as if we'd lost our nerve.

Instead of building on the technology that had gotten us

to the Moon, and saying okay, let's go to Mars,

we ended up to a shuttle which was going nowhere.

We went into lower Earth orbit for

the next forty years.

And I think a lot people felt a certain amount of betrayal.

So far, the previous generations since Apollo have

not picked up that torch and carried it forward.

We're approaching the

50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing.

People who watched it happen are still around and still

remember a time when we did things like this.

And if anybody had told me that I would be 64 and

we wouldn't be on Mars,

I would have thought they were crazy.

Dr. Zubrin, you're mad that this vision

has been stolen from a generation?

Yes, we turned our back on the

whole Apollo vision.

It's like Columbus coming back from the New World and.

Ferdinand and Isabella saying,

"so what, forget it, burn the ships."

The purpose of space ships is to actually travel across

space and go to new worlds.

Mars is where the science is,

Mars is where the challenge is,

and Mars is where the future is.

That if we say no, that is beyond us,

then it would really indicate that we have become less than

the kind of people we used to be and that is something that

this country cannot afford.

As the others prepared Olympus Town for the

official evacuation order, Robert and I took a trip to

visit an old friend, we needed her help taking us back.

There she is.

Never thought we'd be trying

to take her back.

Me neither.

It looks like she's been through a war.

She has.

This is it, your home for the seven-month

journey and the first two years you'll be living on Mars

surface, when the time comes to face the unknown,

there has never been another suit of armor more

skillfully crafted than this one.

Take good care of her.

She'll take good care of you.

I want you to stop and ask yourself what

really is important to you about this mission;

And if the answer to that question is not the most

important thing in your life, then I'm gonna invite you to

walk out that door and pursue that thing, whatever it is.

And don't ever look back, because no one will ever have

the right to hold it against you.

Well alright, welcome home.

External solar arrays are online.

Initializing for start up on my mark...

3, 2, 1.

Engage.

Pressurizing.

No pressure now Hana,

this is all of humanity relying on you.

You ready for this?

Three.

Are you?

Two, one, ignition.

Pressurization complete.

NDEs are registering no

micrometeoroid damage.

She'll need the new parts to address the damage from landing,

but Cygnus brought everything we need to

get her flight-ready.

How will it be?

What's that?

Going home.

I'm already home.

Marta...

I thought you might be interested in this.

It was Paul's.

I'd like you to have it.

Is there anything I can do to help?

Thank you.

When Paul was working on his

early climate resistant hybrid studies,

I went with him to the western highlands of Guatemala.

We knew that if we didn't plan our lives around our work

we'd never see each other at all.

He was always gone, sometimes weeks.

Because on top of his own research,

he also decided that he could figure out how this particular

pathogen was spreading through local communities,

so I barely got to see him.

And I resented him for it.

It was as if, plants were more important to him

than human beings.

Certainly to my mind, more important than me.

Eventually I understood that for Paul,

every time he looked at those plants,

he could see all the people they could feed,

all the people they could heal.

So how did he figure it out?

Figure what out?

The pathogen.

How was it spreading?

Paul realized that the outbreak

pattern followed the same vectors as one of the airborne

blights he'd been tracking.

He'd also been mapping these very complex wind flows

from the mountains.

And from that, he was able to conclude that the pathogen

must have mutated, and it was able to survive

in the air and travel on...

The wind.

Yeah.

By executive order, all non-evacuation related

extra-vehicular activity is now prohibited.

The biggest failure in history...

biggest failure in history.

It's easy...

yeah, easy.

Four years of my life...

20 years preparing.

Very good and it's over.

Hey.

We'd be looking for another location

with moisture to replicate the reaction use on the WAVAR

so we'd be following the wind patterns.

Wind patterns.

Javier and I found something.

The samples were too contaminated to analyze but I

figured it blew in from the east in the storm because of

the easterly arc of the wind, no way to track its source.

Your story made me think.

Even though I may not be able to pinpoint where it came from,

I can figure out where else it might have blown to.

The way the Tharsis Plateau affects the wind flow,

it would have blown straight into the

recurring slope lineae.

On these elevated bedrock outcrops just to the west.

If there wasn't a moratorium on

nonessential EVAs...

What moratorium?

The history of space exploration begins

with individuals taking the road not taken,

with people with a vision.

I really never had any doubts

that it was possible to go to the Moon.

Today I know.

People being able to see with their minds

what others had yet to be able to see with their eyes.

There is a direct correlation between

the dreams and the works of science fiction

and the reality.

We as humans over and over again create the future,

we create the future we envision.

And then we bring to bear our resources, our capital,

our technology, our friendships,

and then we make it real.

What is this building called?

This is the launch tower,

so this is where the astronauts would go up,

and then there would be a big arm that would swing over to

the spacecraft, and then they'd walk down the gangway,

climb in the spacecraft, go to space.

This isn't floors, this is feet.

The long-term goal of SpaceX is to establish a

self-sustaining civilization on Mars.

Pretty cool.

It's always seemed like we should have gone there by now,

that's what everyone expected.

We just kind of lost our way.

It's a long way down.

But now we're gonna get back there.

SpaceX Falcon 9 go for launch.

Stage 1 tanks pressing for flight.

Verify F9 is in startup.

F9 is in startup.

T-minus 4 minutes.

SpaceX Falcon 9 go for launch.

Vehicle's in manual.

T-minus 1 minute.

This is a return to flight launch.

We'd had a failed mission on June 28 of 2015.

After the failure, the whole launch program ground to a halt.

That obviously put a lot of strain on the company.

All stations verify ready for launch.

T-minus 30 seconds.

Elon Musk has said the key to get to Mars

is the reusability of rockets.

He wants to be able to fire a rocket into orbit,

launch a payload into space, and then fire retro rockets

and bring that rocket down to land vertically, and reuse it.

That's an extremely difficult concept.

If he cannot make rockets truly reusable then he cannot

launch a new civilization on Mars.

So the stakes for every rocket launch are huge.

T-minus 20 seconds.

Stage Two tanks pressing for flight.

Flight computer has control of the vehicle.

Do we see anything on the sensors

that's a problem?

No, nothing.

They all say go for launch.

T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

It's gone, baby.

Let's go, check it out.

Speed 1.2 kilometers down range distance 11 kilometers.

Shortly after main engine cut off,

we're going to separate the stages and

begin the second stage ignition.

Come on.

Main engine cut off.

The first stage is returning to land as the second stage

powers the OrbComm satellites to low Earth orbit.

The fairings have successfully deployed.

The first stage will soon begin its series of three

burns to head back towards Cape Canaveral.

Where is it going?

Okay, this is bad.

Potentially bad.

That is that first stage, coming back down.

History in the making guys.

It's standing up!

Coming in, it sounded like an explosion.

Yeah man!

My God!

Look at this, look at this!

It's just sitting there, look at that.

What... holy smokes man.

It's kind of amazing that this window of opportunity

is open for life to go beyond Earth.

And we just don't know how long that window

is going to be open.

The thing that gets me most fired up is that creating

a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would be

the greatest adventure ever...

ever in human history.

It would be so exciting to wake up in the morning and

think that that's what's happening.

Apollo is still within living memory.

Houston the Eagle has landed.

But the longer we let it fade into the past,

the dimmer our prospects become.

We do need to make discoveries,

we do need to find out the truth about life,

and the universe.

To resolve mysteries that thinking men and women have

wondered about for thousands of years.

Look up, look up!

There's everything out there!

There's trillions of other Earths.

That's why we're gonna do it and the next time we go,

we're gonna go to stay.

The story Leslie Richardson told me

sparked a thought.

Javier and I found something at the old workshop.

I need to go there.

The wind patterns lead to a location

87 kilometers west of Olympus Town.

We hoped to find a new sample of the substance.

Marta found on the WAVARs.

Leslie, have you ever driven one of these?

No, I haven't.

Do you want to have a go?

Come.

We're here at IMSF headquarters waiting for.

Secretary Seung to make her announcement regarding what we

believe will be the end of the Mars mission.

We've come so far,

we stop now the Mars dream is dead.

Today marks the end of an era,

and the beginning of a new one.

There is life on Mars.

We had come so far.

Overcome so many obstacles.

And though there were times when our faith flagged,

we persevered.

There would be no evacuation.

And as we prepared for the next phase,

one thing was clear.

Our dream was alive.