The sun is setting over Hanksville, Utah, population 240, as I take the turn out of town onto rutted Cow Dung Road. This may be what locals call Oasis Valley, but to my eye it stretches barren and desolate as far as I can see. Sixty-five million years ago, this was a teeming sea. Today it is red desert, gutted with canyons and riddled with contorted wind-worn ridges, peaks and plateaus.

Several kilometres on, long after I’ve started wondering where in the world I am, I spot it: An eight-metre-high, white soup-can-shaped structure mounted on landing struts. Behind it, atop a mudstone hillock, a red, green and blue flag flaps in the evening breeze.

Welcome to Analog Mars.

In 1969, a Space Task Group, appointed by Richard Nixon, proclaimed that America would land a man on Mars within 15 years. Politics, however, soon intervened and the Mars space program was aborted. Just as it was looking like any Mars initiative would still be relegated to a far-off future, President George Bush, in an address to the House last summer, announced major new initiatives in the space exploration program. Efforts will focus on sending a peopled mission back to the Moon, he said, and within a generation, on to Mars.

But all along a crew of believers has been working in the background. Call them mavericks, visionaries or fantasists, chances are they belong to the Mars Society, a non-profit, international band of roughly 5,000 scientists, engineers, sci-fi writers, even NASA higher-ups dedicated to the human exploration of the red planet. Founded in 1998, the group is already building living laboratories here on Earth on terrain resembling the geology seen in photos of Mars.

“Whether through the government or private industry, we will get to Mars,” says inorganic chemist Tony Muscatello, a founding society member and senior scientist at the research and development company Pioneer Astronautics. “It’s inevitable. Humans are an exploring species. It’s built into our genetic code.”