Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer and head of the Mars Direct program at Martin Marietta in the early 1990s, argues NASA could put humans on Mars within a decade using existing technology, not some future breakthrough. The film follows his campaign to sell that plan to a space agency he says has been "going around in circles" since Apollo, and to skeptics like NASA's Edward Weiler, who counters that the agency does not yet know how to keep a Mars crew alive long enough to bring them home. Interviews lay out Zubrin's case for Mars specifically: it is the planet most like Earth, holds resources that could support a future settlement, and offers a real test of whether life exists beyond our own. Animation sequences imagine what a crewed landing and eventual terraforming might look like, set against archival footage of shuttle launches and mission control. The core of the film is the argument itself, an engineer pushing a workable plan against an agency, and a public, that has lost its appetite for the risk.