Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth

Throughout the ages, no planet has been the focus of more passionate dreaming than Mars. Perhaps the greatest proof of this widely held obsession is the extraordinary commitment of a group of NASA scientists-highly trained, brilliant men and women at the top of their fields, who have forgone high-paying prestigious jobs in private industry to devote their lives to the Red Planet. Not since The Right Stuff has there been such a diverse and charismatic group of space explorers, and Laurence Bergreen has been given unrestricted access to their work and their lives. In Voyage to Mars, he discovers who these visionaries are and what drives them to push the limits of science.

Voyage to Mars takes us beyond the last frontier in a new variation on the ancient theme of man striving against nature. It is an exciting, suspenseful, and dramatic narrative centered on a quest that is nothing less than transcendent: the meaning of life. As Bergreen has written, "To understand the Red Planet, even partially, is to understand something about the nature of the universe, to catch a glimpse of our distant past and our future, to extend perception to a scale much larger than ordinary human comprehension, to harness the imagination to the intellect, and the intellect to the stars."