Inside the Fight to Save Mars From Inheriting Earth’s Mess

When we gaze into the vast night sky from our terrestrial home, space certainly seems like an overwhelmingly wild and desolate place: an empty plain primed for settlement. When Star Trek debuted in the ’60s and began calling space “the final frontier,” it was in the midst of a geopolitical race to the moon with the Soviet Union. “Final frontier” became synonymous with a spirit of space expansion that is deeply, perhaps distressingly, American.

Now, with an increasing number of billionaires whipping out spaceships for their own public rocket-measuring contest, a growing...