National Geographic's "Mars" premiered mid-November and featured a large budget production amounting to $400million and the stellar production team of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. This marks a new era for the nature and wildlife documentary channel, setting its sights to become like series-hitmaker HBO. Another thing coming could be the fact that Elon Musk's SpaceX plays a vital role in the Mars mission depicted onscreen.
According to The Daily Beast, National Geographic's timing could not have been more perfect, with many Americans hoping to migrate to Canada (READ: Best cities to migrate to in Canada) amidst November 9's election results. Perhaps this series could goad people into moving to Mars instead. Set in shifting timelines of present day and 2033, the series brilliantly tackles how humans intend to colonize Mars within the next 20 years. In its first episode, SpaceX founder, Elon Musk says," I think it's important to get a self-sustaining situation on Mars as soon as possible. Because either we're going to be an interplanetary species and a spacefaring civilization, or we're going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event."
The docu-series shifts through dramatic story-telling featuring fictional space agency International Mars Science Foundation, and in-depth explanations of thereal-life technologies being researched on and utilized towards the big move to Mars. Other notable figures playing a part in the series are astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Andy Weir, author of "The Martian" and former Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell.
According to Engadget, SpaceX's reusable rockets figured strongly in the first episode, launching the crew on a perilous yet determined journey to the red planet. In addition, two important clips were shown during the episode, even featuring failures by SpaceX. The clips featured the explosion of their experimental Falcon 9 rockets, as well as the devastated expressions of Elon Musk's employees.
During its inception, the project was born when a meeting between Elon Musk and lead producer Justin Wilkes. Wilkes initially intended to do a documentary on the engineer cum business magnate in developing his SpaceX program. Musk refused a biography-type series and pitched that National Geographic do a documentary on the interplanetary race to Mars instead, "the bigger story", according to Musk.
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