The homeschooled sixth-grader from Golden, Colo. attended every minute of the first three days of the Mars Society Conference last week. He watched speeches, lectures and discussions for 10 to 12 hours a day.
"He outlasts mom and dad," said his father, Bill Fosmire, a Denver physician who accompanied George to the conference.
George is all business when he explains the itinerary of the mission that would land him on Mars. The few years of preparation he needs would put the mission into the 2003 launch window. Then, given the 6-month transit each way and leaving enough time to explore the surface, George would be 17 when he returned -- old enough to get his driver's license. With that anticipation, his matter-of-fact expression brightened into a wide smile.
George grew up with a fondness for space, but his interest in Mars spiked when he first heard proposals to terraform the planet, he said. Terraforming is the process of transforming a planet, or other impossibly harsh and barren place, into a habitat that can support earthlike life. It would include such strategies as building an atmosphere rich in greenhouse gasses and radiation-blocking molecules like ozone. Preparing other planets to sustain life would be really cool, George said.
While he said he loved the whole conference, George particularly enjoyed an afternoon session about proposed forms of advanced propulsion that could be used to boost spacecraft to Mars. Topics introduced nuclear-powered engines, schemes for sailing on the solar wind, and even a laser-powered craft.
"Of course, the laser-powered one is a little far-fetched," George explained, "It requires a gigawatt. That's a lot of power." A gigawatt is 1 billion watts. In 1990, if all the electrical generating plants in the United States had operated at full capacity simultaneously, they would have produced 690 gigawatts.
Homeschooled since kindergarten, George is already taking college-level physics and calculus, he said.
His father explained that George was doing simple algebra by the time he entered kindergarten. The basic 1+1 classroom lessons bored him, and the schools were not flexible enough to place George in classes with older children. So his parents decided to teach him at home.
George has his own criticisms of the public-school system.
"Kids in public school don't get a true science class until high school," he said, explaining that true science involves experimentation, and the discovery of the way things behave, not just reading facts form a textbook.
George's appreciation of the Mars conference is related.
"It's different than just learning from the textbooks," George said. "In the real world you learn that there isn't just one way of doing things. I went to a conference today and for an hour these two guys were arguing about the best way to send humans to Mars, and they both had good ideas."
One of the presenters had developed a mission plan for astronauts to visit Mars and return to Earth, George said. The other disagreed, arguing that a return trip would be a waste of resources. He reasoned that humans should start a permanent settlement on Mars from the very first mission.
George wants to be on that first mission even if it doesn't happen when he is a teenager. He's partial to coming home afterward, though.
That humans will soon voyage to Mars is certain, George said. He doesn't worry that the lack of a Mars program might thwart his aspiration of being the first to stick his spaceboot in the red martian dust. George is looking on toward other challenges.
"Just the other day I heard another kid say he wanted to be the first one to go to Mars. So I have some competition," he said.
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