When the country that saw you born seizes the fruit of your labor… When entrepreneurship no longer pays… When destiny offers you an extraordinary opportunity such as one meets only once in a lifetime, you must seize it.
The head of SpaceX intends to send one million humans to Mars. His company announces its first permanent civilian mission to the red planet and opens applications to the entire world. A man, in his fifties, a Frenchman, with no engineering degree, applies without much believing in it. He ends up being selected and leaves for training to become one of the first permanent colonists of the red planet.
From the solitude of a self-builder to the forced fraternity of fifteen colonists on this incredible adventure, this novel recounts the improbable trajectory of a man who chose to leave, and who succeeded.
An anticipation novel grounded in official sources, from NASA to SpaceX, on the Martian program.
Book 1 of a tetralogy.
A fiction rooted in reality
SpaceX's Martian program is not fiction. The Hohmann transfer trajectory (98-day transit), the underground infrastructures envisioned for the first Martian bases (airlocks, habitats, greenhouses, ISRU for in-situ resource extraction, storage), the technical and human challenges of colonizing Mars: everything that serves as the backdrop to this novel relies on official publications, technical conferences and publicly accessible documents.
What you will find in this novel
A first-person narrative weaving the introspection of a man at a crossroads, the technical and physical apprenticeship of a future colonist, the spatial crossing in the close quarters of fifteen characters of contrasting profiles and nationalities, and finally the arrival on Mars with all it entails: the discovery of a world, the building of a new life, and the definitive absence of return.
⚡ This book does not imagine a distant future. It tells what our generation will witness in its own lifetime.