If the governments of the world’s industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to explore Mars. No, more still: Brumado was its soul.

For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly tenacious grip.

Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a muddy, rainswept hill overlooking the posh residencias of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher. He was no stranger to struggle.

Mars became his obsession. "My one vice," he would modestly say of himself.

When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the Soviet Union and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of that planet’s surface.