BOULDER, COLORADO -- An ongoing war on terrorism, a shaky economy, as well as disinterested politicians and a less-than-stellar NASA vision of the future - all these facts have conspired to make the quest for Mars seemingly more distant than ever.

There is no doubt that the technical know how for dispatching humans to the red planet is available. Sure, a little touch of robotics and automation heresome interplanetary Internet and artificial gravity there would help. That being said, this long-held flight of fantasy can become a 21^st century certainty.

Nobody has ever claimed that setting foot on Mars would be easy.

Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, used well-worn viewgraphs to make another passionate pitch for a humans to Mars program. A vacuum exists in the political establishment, as well as NASA itself, for promoting such a mission anytime soon - a trek, he said, that should cost roughly $10 billion if done in the private world.

Zubrin contrasted current NASA Administrator, Sean O'Keefe, with his predecessor, Daniel Goldin. "We had a past administrator who had a million visionsnow we have one with apparently none," he said.

"NASA is being kept as a force in being instead of a force in motion," Zubrin said. "Vision has to be injected into the space program. And it has to be a coherent vision," he said.

One would think that, with America in a war weary state as it battles the forces of terrorism, flying off to Mars assuredly falls flat in the eyes of the public and politicians.

Zubrin bristles at the view. After all, the United States went to the Moon in a period of greater crisis than is evident today, he said.

"It would be a great tragedy if Osama bin Laden deflected us. The thing that distinguishes us from the enemy is our belief in our freedom, in free inquiry, and the free use of human reason. The space program is emblematic of what we're fighting for," Zubrin said.

For the Mars Society, a strategic plan is in full swing, Zubrin told SPACE.com. "We start small, do something real, earn credibility, and use that to launch a project an order of magnitude greater. By doing that, we grow ourselves technically, financially, and politically," he said.

The Mars Society has the privately funded habitats to back up this tactic.

The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station is located high in the Canadian Arctic on Devon Island. A second one of these large, tin can-looking stations is also anchored in Utah desert. A third habitat is headed for installation at a desolate piece of property in Iceland next year.

Each is a full-scale replica of a Mars habitat. Select teams make use of the high-tech havens to simulate living and working conditions on the red planet, grappling with day-to-day assignments in a simulated Mars world.

In another venture, teams from four universities are at work on space hardware. This gear is designed to determine whether Mars' one-third gravity level can be tapped as a countermeasure against the well-documented physical impact on the human body from near zero microgravity.

The next make-believe Mars habitat to land on Earth is headed for Iceland. This European Mars Analog Research Station, known in short-form as Euro-Mars, is managed by a consortium of European Mars Society Chapters.

"What we wanted to do was to build on the strengths of the two current analog research stations," said Bo Maxwell of the United Kingdom, one of the project managers for Euro-Mars.

Now on temporary display until early September at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois, Euro-Mars is outfitted with three decks for living and working space. Thats an extra deck contrasted to the earlier stations. Crew comfort and noise reduction is maximized in the new triple-decker habitat, Maxwell said.

Additionally, the Euro-Mars design is replete with a medical bay and a command and control "cockpit". This added cockpit doubles as a built-in radiation shelter, a kind of storm cellar that would be used by crews en route from Earth to Mars in times of solar flares. Once a hab of this style reaches Mars, the shelter area then becomes a main communications hub.

Maxwell said Iceland and Euro-Mars go together. "Iceland is a recognized Mars analog location," he said.

Given thousands of square kilometers of volcanically active surface area, the lava desert where Euro-Mars is to be placed is a surreal paradise. Nearby are roughly 250 geothermal vents, ideal hunting grounds for extremophiles that love bathing in those hot spots.

At some point, the hope is that Mars simulations here on Earth give way to the real thing.

Going to Mars is a new dimension in space exploration, said five-time space traveler, Jeffrey Hoffman. He himself was the first astronaut to log 1,000 hours aboard the Space Shuttle.

Hoffman said that space travelers en route to Mars will face a visual environment not changing for many, many months. As Earth recedes to a tiny point of light, only the Sun will loom large in the black of space until Mars grows and glows into a reddish sphere.

The opening up of the Martian frontier is now, and will for years to come, be the province of space robots, Hoffman said. "For myself, I love robots. Theyve already taken me as close as Im ever going to get to the surface of Mars," he said.

Hoffman advocates avoiding arguments on humans versus robots. "We should argue for intelligent exploration, and then let the cards fall where they mightand make rational decisions on whats the best way for intelligence on site to carry out exploration," he said.

Most space exploration has been and always will be done by machines, the former astronaut said, meaning telescopes, satellites, probes and robots. "We really need to use all the virtual reality tools that we possess, to put ourselves inside of the robots," Hoffman said.

Robotic craft will so excite people and the politicians, Hoffman added, everyone will want to know Mars as well as is humanly possible.

"Thats the key. As well as humanly possiblebecause ultimately for all the talk of virtual reality, the best vessel to carry human consciousness to a new environment is the human body," Hoffman said.

Arguably, the Mars Society convention is part pep rally, part watering hole for wayward Mars adventurers with a new idea. Many of those in attendance are resolute in striking out and staking out the red planet for future human Mars colonists.

There are plenty of views on how best to tame the Martian wilderness, even do a little Mars makeover to turn the Suns fourth planet into a more appealing, Earth-like world.

But there are also those who suggest a "tread lightly" approach to Mars.

"We are a very short-lived species. We dont know what our tenure in the universe is going to be," said Penny Boston, an astrobiologist who heads Complex Systems Research, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado.

"Biology just keeps chugging along. So if we actually find a way to begin a biosphere again on Mars, this is something that is going to rapidly get out of control. Biology will always win. You are essentially starting with the end product of 3.8 billion years of evolution. You are not starting fresh. We think of ourselves as the crown of creation. But really, from the point of view of microbes, were just habitat," Boston said.