MARS is a thrilling National Geographic series following the quest to colonise Mars by 2032, featuring guest interviews with Elon Musk. Via Space:
National Geographic’s “Mars” returns for a second season on Monday (Nov. 12), bringing a blend of extraterrestrial drama and real-life insights about humanity’s future on the Red Planet. The docudrama premiered in 2016 with the story of the first humans to ever embark on a mission to the Red Planet. While actors dramatize the events taking place on Mars, real-life experts bring the story down to Earth with unscripted segments in which they explain humanity’s progress toward launching a real crewed Mars mission and the challenges that will face the first Mars colonists. These so-called “big thinkers” include Elon Musk, Bill Nye, Andy Weir and other experts from NASA and the private spaceflight industry.
When the story left off at the end of Season 1, things were looking pretty bleak at Olympus Town, the Martian colony built by a group of astronauts working with the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF). After losing multiple lives to a series of unfortunate events — accidents caused by a combination of human error and the Martian environment — IMSF officials on Earth were considering putting an end to the whole gig, bringing the colonists back home and never sending people back to Mars again. [Living on ‘Mars 2’: The Real Tech Behind Nat Geo’s Martian Colony]
Season 2 picks up the story five years later, and not only are the colonists still on Mars, but the Martian population is booming! Several new spaceships (which bear a striking resemblance to SpaceX’s “BFR”) have arrived with dozens more IMSF astronauts. But that’s not all — now a for-profit corporation called Lukrum Industries is sending crews of miners to Mars in an effort to take advantage of natural resources like water. Naturally, the two groups start stepping on each other’s toes. This new conflict between the scientists and miners leads to the first group brawl on Mars, and that fistfight is only the beginning.