The short answer: about seven months. With today's rockets, a spacecraft that leaves Earth in a launch window reaches Mars in roughly six to nine months. NASA's Perseverance rover took 203 days in 2020 and 2021. The fastest trip so far, the Mariner 7 flyby in 1969, took 131 days. No human has made the journey yet, so every number below comes from robotic missions. A crew would travel on the same paths, with the same timetable. Why it takes months, not days The distance between Earth and Mars changes all the time, because both planets circle the Sun at different speeds. At their very closest it is about 54.6 million km, on average about 225 million km, and at their farthest, on opposite sides of the Sun, about 401 million km. A spacecraft does not fly in a straight line. It is launched into its own orbit around the Sun and travels about half a loop until Mars arrives at the same point. This curved path, called a Hohmann transfer, is longer than the straight distance, but it needs the least fuel. Fuel is the real limit: every extra kilogram has to be lifted off Earth. How long real missions took Mariner 7 (1969, flyby): 131 days, the fastest so far Mariner 4 (1964 to 1965, flyby): about 7.5 months Curiosity (2011 to 2012, landing): about 8.5 months Perseverance, Tianwen-1 and Hope (2020 to 2021): about 7 months each A flyby can be quicker because it does not have to stop. An orbiter or a lander must brake hard on arrival, so it usually takes a slower, cheaper path. The 26-month launch window An efficient trip is only possible when Earth and Mars are in the right position, and that happens about every 26 months. Miss the window and you wait more than two years for the next one. That is why three missions, from the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates, all launched in July 2020. More on this in The Window Year: Why Ships Reach Mars Only Every 26 Months. How long would a round trip take? A crew could not simply turn around. After arriving, they would have to wait on Mars until the planets line up again for the way home, which takes about a year and a half. A full round trip would last about two and a half to three years. Could we get there faster? Stronger propulsion, such as the nuclear thermal rockets NASA is studying, could shorten the trip to a few months. These engines are still in development. A faster trip would matter mostly for people: fewer months of space radiation and weightlessness, and less food, water and oxygen to carry. How long does a message take? Even radio is not instant. A signal needs between 3 and 22 minutes to travel one way, depending on where the two planets are. A conversation between Earth and Mars is never live. What this means in ICARUS ICARUS is set on Mars in the 2090s, and this timetable shapes the whole story: ships arrive only in windows, and help from Earth is always months or years away. When a settlement is in trouble, the others on Mars are the only ones close enough to help. See Where on Mars Is ICARUS Set?, or step into the world and ask Luna. Sources NASA: Mars 2020 Perseverance mission Space.com: How long does it take to get to Mars? List of missions to Mars (Wikipedia)

Basic Information Full Name: Anatoly Mikhailovich Ivanov Date of Birth: February 19, 2032 Place of Birth: Kaliningrad, Russia Education: Naval Command Training, Peter the Great Naval Academy, Saint Petersburg - Class of 2063 Advanced Aerospace and Life Systems Command Certification – Roscosmos Officer Program, 2067 Final Qualification: Cosmonaut Training Graduate, Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center Major Anatoly Mikhailovich Ivanov Current Role Position: Settlement Commander, Vostok Outpost (Russian Sector, Mars) Military Rank: Major (retained honorary title after decommissioning) Affiliation: Roscosmos Martian Division, Colonial Security & Survival Command Character Overview Major Ivanov is the last soldier of a forgotten war, a man bred for duty, honor, and national pride. A former naval officer turned cosmonaut, his journey to Mars was not an ambition, but a posting. He took it out of duty, and perhaps because Earth no longer had any place left for men like him. Before Mars, Ivanov fought in the two wars that broke the country he had sworn to defend: the EU-Russian War and the Russo-Chinese War. Russia lost both. It lost territory, influence, and the illusion that history was still moving in its favor. Ivanov survived the defeats, but not untouched. By the time he was reassigned to Mars, he was no longer a rising officer. He was a veteran of failed campaigns, useful enough to command a remote mining outpost, but too closely tied to a defeated era to be welcomed at the center of power. He was once a respected field officer and survival commander, disciplined, unflinchingly loyal, and hardened by wars Russia had no longer been strong enough to win. Mars was not his ambition. It was where men like him were sent when Earth had no honorable place left for them. But years on Mars, surrounded by broken infrastructure, fading flags, and unanswered requests from Moscow, have eroded the clear edges of his identity. His rank never matched the burden placed on him. Vostok was too remote, too poor, and too politically inconvenient to deserve a general. It received a major instead, one stubborn enough to keep the flag standing after everyone else had stopped looking. He commands what’s left of Vostok. Barely. The walls leak. Supplies are scarce. And the world he once defended now watches him with indifference. Key Traits Strengths ✔ Command Presence – Ivanov still carries authority in his voice and posture. People stand straighter when he enters. His leadership may be rigid, but it keeps morale from shattering. ✔ Veteran's Clarity – He sees through political performance and posturing. What matters is survival—everything else is background noise. ✔ Stubborn Patriot – His loyalty to Russia is both a strength and a weakness. He refuses to be a puppet to Earth’s shifting alliances. ✔ Dark Humor – Beneath the military stoicism lies a biting wit, often surfacing in sarcasm, barbs, or provocations meant to test others. Flaws ✖ Pride to the Point of Ruin – Ivanov would rather let the station rot than beg for help. To him, dignity is worth dying for—even if others disagree. ✖ Distrust of Outsiders – Whether Chinese, American, or Martian-born, Ivanov assumes manipulation until proven otherwise. ✖ Tired and Bitter – He knows he’s becoming obsolete and resents the world for moving on without him. ✖ Poor Adaptability – While he endures, he doesn’t often evolve. Change doesn’t suit him—it threatens his identity. Disclaimer: All characters, events, and storylines presented on this website are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. Visual representations of characters were created using AI-generated imagery and are intended solely for illustrative purposes. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

The hidden chain reaction behind a Martian collapse “If the storm stresses the dome too fast—boom.It won’t crack, it’ll burst.”— Misha Volkov, miner, survivor On Sol 10 of Mars Year 73, the Russian Vostok Outpost suffered a catastrophic failure that killed over a dozen settlers and destroyed its main greenhouse. For outsiders, it may have seemed like an unfortunate accident — an unlucky hit in the vast quiet of the Martian frontier. But to those who lived and worked inside its fragile corridors, the signs had been there for years. A fragile system under siege Vostok’s greenhouse wasn't destroyed by a gust of Martian wind. As wind is very weak on Mars. It was destroyed by time, dust, and silence — the silence of Earth authorities ignoring maintenance requests, overlooking worn-out seals, dismissing overworked engineers’ warnings. Martian dust — finer than flour, electrically charged — had been infiltrating the station for decades. It coated circuits, clogged filters, degraded the polymer seams holding the greenhouse panels. Tiny intrusions that added up — until the systems designed to protect life began to suffocate it instead. And then there was the pressure: Inside, the greenhouse maintained 14 psi of breathable air. Outside, the Martian atmosphere sat at less than 0.1 psi. A dangerous difference — a fragile balance. The final blow When the storm — later called The Red Curtain — hit, it brought the highest dust density ever recorded in that region. The filtration system was already under stress. The coolant levels were dropping. And deep within the dome, uneven internal heating created dangerous pressure pockets. Sensors detected it — but not fast enough. A northern truss, already weakened by dust corrosion and material fatigue, buckled under the combined stress. The internal pressure found its opening. And the greenhouse burst. "She could almost hear the pressure inside the dome straining...like breath held too long inside a crushed chest." The explosion was brief — a rush of air into the vacuum, dragging debris, tearing plastic, and blowing out vital infrastructure. The oxygen didn’t just escape. It vanished — leaving behind silence and broken glass. Could it have been prevented? Yes. With proper maintenance. With fresh seals. With better communication. With listening. But Vostok was forgotten. Too remote to matter. Too expensive to repair. Too late to save. Seen in: 📘 Scene 1: When the Sky Turned Red – Vostok Station👤 Characters involved: Elena Markova, Pyotr Sokolov, Misha Volkov, Anatoly Ivanov Want to witness it happen? Read Scene 1. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

Basic Information Full name: Irina Antonovna Kuznetsova Date of birth: April 29, 2039 Place of birth: Tomsk, Siberia, Russia Education: High school diploma Irina Kuznetsova Position Miner, Vostok Settlement (Russian sector, Mars) One of Vostok's founding generation, and one of its last surviving members Roscosmos Mars Division, Mining and Infrastructure Corps Irina's Story Irina Kuznetsova never became an engineer, and she never called herself one, but she could fix almost anything that had wheels, pressure or an engine. Before Mars she drove trucks across the Siberian taiga, hauling freight on roads that barely deserved the name, in country where the nearest mechanic could be three days away. If a tree fell across the road, she cleared it. If a bridge sagged under its own weight, she shored it up, or built a new one if she had to. Nobody trained her for any of this. The taiga did. Tomsk, the Other End of the Country Irina grew up in Tomsk, far from Novosibirsk, at the far edge of a region so vast that two Siberians can grow up through the same brutal winter without sharing a single memory of home. She finished school with a high school diploma and went no further. What she had instead was a truck, a route, and a country that did not forgive mistakes. The Selection When Mars opened its gates to colonists, they were not only looking for engineers with degrees. They needed people who could be sent into the worst conditions and still come out alive. The selection was less an interview than a brutal survival exercise. Cameras recorded every step, but no help ever came. Irina did more than pass. This was her world. The Golden Age of Vostok Irina arrived on Mars in the mid-2060s, at Russia's peak in the colonization race, when Vostok was still new: the symbol of Russian expansion into space. She had never worked in a mine before she landed. She learned it the way she learned everything else: the hard way. Decades later she would be one of the few people at the settlement who still remembered what Vostok looked like before the decline. Disclaimer: All characters, events, and storylines presented on this website are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. Visual representations of characters were created using AI-generated imagery and are intended solely for illustrative purposes. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon. Olvasd magyarul: Irina Antonovna Kuznyecova, a Vosztok-telep bányásza

Vostok Settlement on Mars, Mars Year 71, Sol 87 (March 2087) The Arrival Elena Markova felt in every cell of her body that she was entering a new world once again. They were still floating in weightlessness. She tied back her unruly blond hair and began preparing. She was nervous, but she was determined not to let it show. There were four others in her rotation. They had been shut up together for four months in this skyscraper-sized transport ship, but if Elena had had the choice, she would not have spent two minutes in the same enclosed space as them. And there were still ninety minutes to go before the descent began. During that time they secured the objects still drifting around them, locked the personal lockers, shut down the non-essential onboard modules, and put on their revolting Sokol M emergency pressure suits. The mere thought of putting hers on already turned Elena's stomach. First she fitted the biomedical sensors that clung to her skin. The moment the system came to life, there was no hiding anything. The display facing her seat spelled out her condition with cold cruelty. Her heart was beating too fast. Her muscles were tense. Low HRV. Ragged breathing. Risk of hyperventilation. She did not look to the side right away. She did not want to see the others. Then she glanced over anyway, and that was the only comfort: apparently, they were in no better shape than she was. No one spoke. When at last all five of them had squeezed themselves into the seats of the descent vehicle, only sixty minutes remained. The protocol's robotic voice listed the tasks impassively, almost politely. Secure thigh and shoulder harnesses. All five passengers moved almost in unison. Secure pelvic restraint. Secure rear helmet restraint. Secure leg restraints. Hands on the chest grips or the side handles. Activate the Automed standby sequence. Switch the personal display to EDL mode. They had rehearsed these movements countless times during training on Earth. They did not even need to remember them. The protocol read out everything step by step. The Automed system prepared the anti-nausea intervention, the non-pharmacological treatment of a panic reaction, and the compression support needed to stabilize circulation. During training all of this had sounded like a dull list. Now, as the expected symptoms flared up in her body one after another, Elena would have liked nothing better than to inject herself with everything the injectors contained. They followed the protocol in silence, all the while acting as if the data on their screens had nothing to do with them. Elena knew they were in as bad a shape as she was, because this time they did not even try to mock her. The inner rim of each helmet also held a vomit collar, a soft, absorbent emergency measure lined with suction channels, which everyone in training had pretended was not humiliating. Twenty minutes before reaching the Martian atmosphere, the descent vehicle separated from the cargo ship with a dull clunk. A short, deep engine impulse pressed them into their seats: the deorbit burn committed the vehicle to its atmospheric-entry trajectory. For months Elena had lived in a large, slow ship whose corridors and common modules made the descent vehicle seem cramped by comparison. Now she clung to the restraints in terror, huddled in a capsule whose only function was to survive the encounter with the Martian atmosphere. The display showed reddish-orange data graphs, and when they finally reached the edge of the atmosphere, a deep, menacing roar came from the direction of the heat shield. The cabin began to tremble gently at first, then gave way to a vibration so brutal that the harnesses cut into her limbs. Tiny beads of condensation gathered on the inner wall of the helmet, thickening into a foggy patch in the center. For a while Elena tried to focus only on her own breathing. The Sokol M's internal system sensed the stress reaction, increased the airflow to the helmet, and flashed a slow, cold rhythm at the edge of the display: breathe. Suddenly she felt a pressure on her chest as if someone had knelt on it. Her stomach churned, her field of vision narrowed, and she thought she was going to faint. Mars did not welcome them. They slammed into it. "Markova, check the cargo spine lock!" the commander's voice cut into the helmet's comm system. Elena did not care for the man in his fifties, whom age alone had made rotation commander on the pilotless, fully autonomous ship. She reminded herself: in Russia, where there are two people, one of them always has to be the commander. What no one could explain to her was why they had chosen as commander a man who read even the system files aloud as if they were protocol instructions. Still, right now she was grateful for the task, because it pulled her back from the edge of fainting. She switched displays and immediately noticed that one of the cargo spine sensors was showing fluctuating values. During intense deceleration, a multi-ton component package was not cargo but a projectile waiting to break loose inside the vehicle. Elena compared the reading with those from the other two independent sensors. It was not a sensor fault; the restraint really had slipped a hair's breadth. She issued the command to activate the backup tensioner so that it would take up the gap; the main latch still held, this was only the fail-safe's fail-safe. She tried to keep her answer as short as possible, so as not to throw up in the middle of the sentence. "Done." The heat shield separated with an enormous crash, followed by a new kind of vibration. The underside of the craft opened, the retropropulsion kicked in, and dozens of sensors and radars guided the lander toward the Vostok settlement. "The wind's buried the pad again," said Elena's neighbor, the twenty-three-year-old Igor, who for four months had talked about his thirst for adventure until it became clear to everyone that he was in fact running from the army. Elena glanced around in surprise, trying to see what the boy had read it from; she found it hard to believe the observation was his own. "The system is comparing the actual terrain with the landing map right now. It'll find the base," Elena remarked. Of the five passengers she was the most highly trained. That, of course, brought her not one step closer to being allowed to command. Her words were followed, like a prophecy come to life, by the system's announcement: "Primary landing site unavailable. Switching to the backup receiving pad." A sharp crackle came over the comm channel. At first nothing could be made out, but all five of them jerked their heads up. For months they had not communicated in real time with the outside world. "What's up, guys? Coming in through the back door?" The man behind the brassy voice violated several points of the prescribed protocol in the span of two sentences, but even that did not stop the newcomers from nearly leaping out of their seats with joy. "Vostok, that's how we like it," the rotation commander guffawed. Elena rolled her eyes at the crude humor, but the truth was that her own heart was pounding in her throat at finally hearing a real human voice from the outside world. The cabin no longer shook the way it had on entering the atmosphere; instead, deep, rhythmic jolts ran through it. At first they pressed her into the seat, then began wrenching her back and forth, until at last everything grew lighter. About four thousand two hundred meters above the surface, Elena noticed that the pressure curve of one engine's combustion chamber lagged the command by the blink of an eye, and the controller then overcorrected. The navigation smoothed it over; it was no catastrophe, but for Elena that was enough. Old valve, worn actuator. The system had aged. The landing was not smooth. That first encounter was enough for the young engineer to understand: on Mars, that word was better forgotten. Here nothing goes smoothly. From the capsule they could see nothing through the enormous dust cloud thrown up by the engines, but the clang of the landing leg, a hard sideways tilt, and the flash of the protocol's "Engines shut down" signal left no doubt that they had arrived. Suddenly all noise ceased. Her own breathing grew strangely loud, and a long-forgotten sensation returned: as if her stomach and her arm were being pulled downward. Weight. Not as much as on Earth, but weight. Compared to the past four months of weightlessness, even this was a brutal return to the body. For at least ten more minutes nothing happened. The system ran an automatic check: it examined the remaining propellant and the hot surfaces of the shut-down engines, the tilt angle of the structure and of the landing legs, the settling of the debris thrown up by the engines, the external pressure, the dust load and the electrostatic charge, the passengers' suits and their seals. And, above all, the physical condition of the new arrivals. They waited out those ten minutes in dead silence. As she stared at the display, Elena did not know why, but the red light of the Siberian checkpoint came back to her: day after day she had fooled the Chinese guards there and smuggled parts and food to the encircled population. She had thought things could not get any worse; it had been hell itself. But back then she did not yet know Mars. At the end of the ten-minute window the displays spelled out, one by one, the individual disembarkation clearances. Beside Elena's name it was not a green signal that lit up but a yellow one: FIT TO WALK, ESCORT REQUIRED. Her vision still kept narrowing, her stomach churned, and out of caution the system had assigned an escort to her. To be escorted. Like a patient. Elena clenched her teeth. Then the protocol's voice announced cabin depressurization. With a series of hisses, the cabin pressure fell in stages to the Martian near-vacuum, and as the umbilical connectors clicked free, their suits switched to autonomous life support. "Cabin pressure equalized. Autonomous suit operation stable," the machine reported. A strip of light sliced across the deck as the loading ramp came down. The vibration of the servos reached her through the floor and through the suit; through the thin air she heard almost nothing of the metallic grinding itself. But when the ramp struck the ground, she felt the impact deep through her entire body. The Sokol M was not a surface work suit. Once disconnected from the umbilical, the suit kept its wearer alive on its own reserves: twenty minutes of guaranteed autonomy, up to forty under light demand. The oxygen supply, the CO₂ scrubbing and the thermal regulation were all sized for the same span; the battery held just enough energy to keep the fan and radio running from the ramp to the receiving airlock. That was all it promised. Nothing more. Instinctively she raised her hand to wipe her face, but her fingers merely tapped against the clear polycarbonate visor. "Come on," she muttered to herself. "Just one step." She stood up. The display blinked yellow: WAIT FOR THE ESCORT. HOLD ON. Elena did not wait. Her muscles protested against the returning gravitational load, a burden her body had forgotten during the long months in microgravity. She took a step toward the ramp, then stumbled and dropped to her knees on the metal plating, already soiled with Martian dust. Her breathing echoed, ragged, inside the helmet. Elena suddenly curled in on herself and began to retch. She tried to hold it back, but the acidic fluid surging up from her stomach struck the vomit collar and spattered the inside of her helmet with a fine spray. Under the collar something came to life at once: with a soft hiss it drew the fluid away from her face into a sealed pouch, and blew a cold jet of air onto the center of the visor, giving Elena a narrow view through the fog. The display switched from yellow to red: MEDICAL ALERT. A technician was already hurrying toward her from the receiving airlock. At the foot of the ramp stood a tall, grim figure in a Mars surface suit. Major Ivanov. For a moment he only watched Elena as she struggled to push herself upright on the dust-covered ramp. An ironic smile lurked in his voice as he remarked: "Nicely done. Welcome to Mars, Markova. The planet needs no introduction, I see. You can already feel it." First Evening in the Settlement Canteen The tired rays of fluorescent tubes bounced off the cold metal walls of the canteen. The monotonous hum of the air filters pulsed through the room like some distant, sickly heartbeat. Clutching her tray, Elena looked for a free seat in the corner, as far as possible from the staring eyes. Men and women sat at the tables, all of them Martian veterans. Their faces were pallid, their eyes tired but alert. They followed the newcomer the way one watches a freshly installed part: will it hold up under load, or will it fail on its very first day. Elena sat down. Her knees buckled as she lowered herself, and the metal chair screeched beneath her. The synthetic puree sloshing on her tray was odorless, tasteless, and after the very first spoonful it threatened to come back up in a retching wave. She had tried to sleep for a few hours, but apparently her body still had not accepted the new reality. She avoided people's eyes. Instead she studied the ceiling and the walls. It struck her quickly that the people who had originally built the station had taken care to route the cables into covered channels and recessed grooves. By now that was a memory at best. The cables ran freely along the walls and ceiling, fixed with electrical tape wherever the mounts had long since failed. The result of repairs like these was always the same: only parts of the system still worked. Some parts of the room were decently lit. Other corners, though, were wrapped in near-total darkness. It was hard to tell whether this was deliberate or had simply turned out that way. Elena retreated into one of those darker corners. But she was hardly inconspicuous. A shadow fell across the table in front of her. A tall woman stood before her. She wore a close-fitting dark-gray technical uniform, with reinforced panels on the chest and shoulders and a wide tool belt at the waist. The tool belt was clearly no ornament. The woman's lean, bony face stayed motionless; her blue eyes measured Elena with the precision of a cutting tool, as if searching out her weak points. Her hair was pulled tightly back, her features taut, as if gravity had dragged down not only her limbs but the muscles of her face as well. She wore neither insignia of rank nor name tag; her presence alone signaled her authority clearly enough. "Markova?" she asked dryly. Elena nodded. "We start at five," the woman said, and was already turning away, back into the gloom of the canteen, as if she had merely filed away some administrative package. Elena watched her vanishing figure for a long moment, then, staring at the puree, she muttered under her breath: "I'm fine, by the way. Thanks." A wiry, middle-aged man at the next table turned in his seat and jabbed a bony finger toward the departing woman: "Lyudmila…" Elena flinched. "What?" she asked dryly. The man shrugged. Not his problem if the woman was jumpy. "The chief engineer. Lyudmila Vetrova. Don't expect any praise from her." Before Elena could answer, shouts rang out from the back of the room: "What's this, Volkov? Taken a liking to the little rookie? Even an old goat likes a lick of salt, eh?" "Look who's got a big mouth now, you little snot," Volkov grumbled without looking over. Then he glanced at Elena. "This lot's no better, but at least they don't bite. A few days, and they'll get used to your face. And you to the air." Elena forced a faint smile. She knew that here even a smile was currency. "Elena," she said. "Misha Volkov," the man introduced himself. "If you need anything, you know where to find me." Elena reached for her tray to leave, but the moment she straightened up, her muscles betrayed her again. Caught in gravity's trap, she teetered and pitched forward in full view of the entire canteen. The tray slid from her hand with a dull clatter. Elena's body had not yet grown used to the new rules. As she stood, her circulation, still adapted to microgravity, failed for a moment to keep her brain properly supplied with blood; by the time her heart caught up, her legs had already sent her momentum the wrong way. It was not simple clumsiness: her circulation and her sense of motion were still tuned to the rules of weightlessness. For a moment, there was frozen silence. Then, as if the whole room had been waiting for just this moment, the laughter broke out. Loud, gut-deep, tearful guffawing that echoed even among the steel girders of the ceiling. Misha Volkov came over to help her up, but Elena, red-faced and with clenched teeth, wrenched herself free of his grip. She started toward the door, but her momentum carried her too far. She could not stop and slammed full-force into the metal doorframe. Now the laughter made it seem as if the whole base were shaking with them. The miners slapped one another on the back. Cursing, Elena staggered out of the canteen, her words swallowed by the noise of the closing door. Inside, the laughter continued for several more minutes. Only Elena did not know that this played out in exactly the same way with every new arrival window. And they all still remembered their own first evening, when Mars had forced them to their knees.

Name: Mikhail "Misha" Volkov Date of Birth: May 5, 2034 Place of Birth: Volgograd, Russia Position: Veteran Miner, Vostok Outpost Previous Occupation: Naval Infantryman (Russian Federation Navy) Mars Arrival: 2073 (aged 39) Misha Volkov From the ashes of one war to the dust of another. Misha Volkov was born into a crumbling century. By the time he turned twenty, the world was already leaning into another war — and he went with it, almost without question. Drafted into the Russian Navy's ground forces, Misha served under the command of Major Anatoly Ivanov during the brutal final campaigns of the EU–Russia conflict. He was not a strategist.Not a leader. He was a soldier in the purest sense: a man who moved forward when others stopped, whose strength was not in words or plans, but in silent endurance. Misha Volkov at 20, dreaming of ships and a life still unbroken. When the war ended in ruins and treaties signed in smoke, there was no home waiting for him. Volgograd’s industrial sprawl — once proud shipyards and factories — had collapsed into a patchwork of shelters and scavengers. Veterans like Misha, too old to be new, too young to be forgotten, flooded the streets. Many found their way into gangs, into bottle fires under broken bridges.Misha found his way to Mars. Or rather, Mars found him — in the form of a single offer from the man he once saluted. Ivanov, now a senior figure in the early colonization efforts, offered him a contract: work the mines of Vostok, or vanish into Earth’s forgotten corners. Misha signed without hesitation. In 2073, he stepped onto Martian soil, a man already carved hollow by one planet, now offering himself to another. Misha Volkov, age 28 — a soldier still able to laugh before the war truly begins. The Miner No Machine Could Replace At Vostok, machines outnumbered men.Massive drilling rigs, automated transports, modular refineries — they did the heavy lifting, but they couldn't survive Mars without constant hands to guide and repair them. Misha became one of those hands. In the thin, bitter air of the red planet, he fought new battles: replacing frozen cables by hand at minus 70 Celsius, realigning fission drills while vibrations rattled bone, wrestling half-ton mineral cages because the robots were too delicate to trust. Every kilo he carried was a battle not just for production, but for the survival of his own body. Gravity on Mars is treacherous — without the burden of work, muscles waste away. Misha did not allow himself to waste. Not on Earth. Not here. When others exercised on treadmills and rubber-band contraptions, Misha simply pushed harder at the rock face. He didn’t lift weights. He lifted the world that refused to carry him. Misha Volkov — only 39, but war had no mercy. A Quiet King Without a Crown Among his own crew — the “Zeta shift,” a ragged but fiercely loyal circle of miners — Misha’s authority was absolute. He was not formally promoted. No titles, no stripes. But in the way others fell silent when he stood, in the way they checked his glance before making a decision — it was clear. Misha Volkov was their backbone. Outside his crew, he was treated with wary respect. To the untrained eye, Misha might have seemed just another battered miner. But the veterans knew. He carried the brittle calm of those who had seen death too closely, too many times. Misha lived under an unspoken code: Protect your own. Stand until you fall. Ask nothing. Expect nothing. It was not kindness that shaped him. It was loyalty — the pure, dangerous kind that makes men invincible in battle and unapproachable in peace. He was, and remains, a figure others orbit carefully: a relic of old wars who chose to stay when so many chose to leave. "Не важно, кто что болтает. Важно, кто на ногах стоит." "Don’t matter what ya say. Matters who's still standin'." — Misha Volkov Disclaimer: All characters, events, and storylines presented on this website are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. Visual representations of characters were created using AI-generated imagery and are intended solely for illustrative purposes. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

Basic Information Full Name: Lyudmila Sergeyevna Vetrova Date of Birth: 2047 (Moscow, Russia) Place of Birth: Moscow, Russia Education: Mining Engineering degree, Moscow State Mining University Position Chief Engineer, Vostok Settlement (Russian Sector, Mars), when Elena Markova arrived Lead Infrastructure Specialist, responsible for the settlement's life-support systems and mining operations Lyudmila Vetrova Lyudmila's Story Moscow, an only child Lyudmila was born in Moscow, the only child of parents already middle-aged by the time she arrived. Her childhood was quiet, orderly, and closely supervised. She received the kind of upbringing that produces either rebels or perfectionists. She belonged to the second kind. Novomoskovsk, a dying basin After earning her degree, she took a position with a coal mining company in the Moscow Basin near Novomoskovsk, one of the country's oldest coal-producing regions, and by then also one of its most exhausted. She spent her twenties running an industry in slow, dignified decline, where everything was measured, logged, and accounted for, even as the seams themselves ran dry. It suited her better than she liked to admit. No reason left to stay Her parents died within a year of each other. With no siblings, no children, and nothing left tying her to Moscow, she applied for the Mars colonization program. What drew her was the promise: modern systems, clear protocols, a settlement run the way a settlement should be run. Arrival, 2076 She arrived on Mars to find exactly the opposite of what had been promised. Earth's wars had already begun strangling the supply lines, and Vostok, barely a few years into its existence, had already learned to live on whatever it could scavenge, trade, or quietly falsify. No orderly system awaited her to inherit. Only crisis awaited, indefinitely. Chief Engineer of a Beautiful Lie She rose to Chief Engineer through sheer competence and endurance, and for more than a decade ran Vostok the only way it could be run: through informal favors, bent rules, and paperwork that told a more flattering story than the truth. Nothing on the settlement was quite what it claimed to be, and everyone knew it. Lyudmila knew it best of all. For a woman who had built her entire identity around order and honesty, this was its own quiet exile: she had traveled two hundred million kilometers to find rules worth trusting, and instead spent every day of her career keeping the lie alive. Because the lie was the only thing still holding Vostok together. Disclaimer: All characters, events, and storylines presented on this website are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. Visual representations of characters were created using AI-generated imagery and are intended solely for illustrative purposes.

Time moves differently on Mars. A single Martian day, known as a sol, lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds, slightly longer than an Earth day. A Martian year, one orbit around the Sun, lasts about 668.6 sols, or roughly 687 Earth days. How Mars Years are counted Planetary scientists number Martian years from a starting point proposed by R. Todd Clancy and colleagues in 2000: Mars Year 1 began on 11 April 1955, at the northern spring equinox of Mars. Every Mars Year starts at that same point of the orbit, called solar longitude 0°, and the years are counted consecutively. The Mars Climate Database and many mission teams use this count. Within a year, days are counted by sol, starting with Sol 1. There is also a continuous count, the Mars Sol Date, which has been running since 1873, but for telling a story the year and the sol are enough. When ICARUS begins On this count, Mars Year 73 begins on 11 September 2090 and ends on 27 July 2092. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, opens on Sol 10 of Mars Year 73: Earth date: 20 September 2090 The story then runs for a little under one Earth year, through a volatile period of Martian colonization, as fragile settlements struggle under political pressure and a hostile environment. Every chapter is anchored in Martian time, because when survival depends on dust, on sunlight for the solar panels and on the timing of launch windows, every sol matters. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

Step outside on Mars without a suit and you have about fifteen seconds before you pass out. With a good suit, you have hours. This post explains where that difference comes from, what runs out first, and why the suits of Vostok, the Russian settlement in ICARUS, are the weak point of every walk outside. Fifteen seconds without a suit The air on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, and its pressure at the surface is less than one percent of Earth's. At that pressure, water boils below body temperature. Saliva and tears would start to bubble, and the lungs could not take in oxygen. ESA's Stefaan de Mey told Space.com that a person exposed to vacuum loses consciousness within 10 to 15 seconds. The thin Martian air changes almost nothing. Without help, brain death follows within minutes. On Mars, a suit is a small spacecraft shaped like a person. What a suit actually does A suit keeps a bubble of pressure around the body. NASA's spacewalk suit, the EMU, holds about 30 kilopascals of pure oxygen, roughly a third of sea-level pressure. It removes the carbon dioxide you breathe out, cools you with water running through tubes in an undergarment, and carries a radio and a battery. Mars adds its own demands. The average temperature is around minus 60 degrees Celsius, so a Mars suit has to keep you warm at night and get rid of your body heat during hard work. Why the limit is counted in hours The EMU supports an astronaut for about 8 hours, plus a 30-minute emergency reserve. The limit comes from the things a suit uses up: oxygen, the filter that absorbs carbon dioxide, cooling water and battery power. The person inside wears out too. Moving in a pressurized suit is hard work, and the hands tire quickly against stiff gloves. A walk outside on Mars would be planned the same way: out and back long before the reserve is touched. What wears a suit down on Mars Over weeks and months, two other dangers count more. The first is radiation. The Curiosity rover measured about 0.64 millisieverts per day at the surface, as Space.com reported. That is about what a person on Earth receives from natural background radiation in three months, and a suit does little against it. The second is dust. Martian dust is finer than flour and electrically charged, so it clings to fabric and works its way into joints, bearings and seals. Every walk outside leaves a little more of it in the suit. The suits of Vostok In ICARUS, Vostok has received nothing from Moscow for years, and its suits show it: scratched panels, hastily replaced joints, fading insignia. In the first chapter, Major Ivanov grabs his temporary suit, a slightly heavier model designed to be worn outside for hours if necessary, with a repaired crack running across the visor. Every patch on such a suit raises the same question: how many more hours will it hold? The chapter, When the Sky Turned Red, begins as a great storm approaches. Why the wind itself is not the danger, the dome post explains. You can also step into the Mítosz exhibition, where Luna, one of the Twin Robots, guides you across Mars. Sources How long could you survive in space without a spacesuit?, Space.com. Radiation on Mars 'Manageable' for Manned Mission, Space.com, 2013. Extravehicular Mobility Unit, specifications. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

Posted by Icarus, 3 For months, editing ICARUS felt like it might never end. Last week it did. The revised English edition is live now. And for the first time, there is a Hungarian edition too. If you read Hungarian, or know someone who does, the link is at the bottom. Here is the strange part. I finished, and instead of resting, I opened a blank page and started writing again. The new book is shorter, and it goes back. Back before the sky turned red over Vostok, before any of the events you know from ICARUS to Elena Markova and the first Russian settlement on Mars. A woman who chose to build something on a planet that did not want her there and paid for it. I write a few pages every evening now. This is the part of the work I love most, the part where the world is still only mine. It won't stay mine for long. That is the whole point of writing it down. If you have not read ICARUS yet, the new edition is the best place to begin. And if you already have, thank you for being here while I start the next one. I'll send word from Mars as it takes shape. Zsolt Read ICARUS (English) → https://www.mitosz.com/icarus ICARUS in Hungarian → https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H7R5BLJM Elena Markova Mítosz zsoltbugarszki@mitosz.com Check out our site

By Zsolt Bugarszki I was born in Hungary, lived in Estonia for years, and now I’m based in Singapore with my family. And while I’ve never been an astronaut, an astrophysicist, or an engineer, I’ve always been a writer. More than thirty years ago, I attended a self-awareness group led by a psychiatrist. At one session, perhaps responding to someone’s story, she said: “We are all replaying old Greek dramas and myths. These stories are alive. Timeless. And we humans act them out again and again.” Those few sentences stayed with me for thirty years. When the idea for the series was born, it was no accident that I called it Mítosz, the Hungarian word for myth. The first book, ICARUS, tells a very old story, moved into the near future and onto Mars. I kept the elements of the original myth throughout, but never named them once. While writing, I felt how true it is that stories have a life of their own: after a while, they almost wrote themselves. My books are about people. I shaped most of the characters from people I have met in my life: in the mining town where I grew up, in psychiatric care, in Central Asia, in Northern Europe, in Singapore. Technology and science interest me a lot, but most of all what they do to us. That is why the story is set in a near future we can reasonably calculate. And that is why it is science fiction: old dramas, played by the characters I have met, placed in a world flexible enough to hold them. I have always been a writer, even when I didn’t finish my stories. Since the age of twelve, I’ve filled school notebooks with short stories, sketches, scenes and outlines. Most were never completed. But the writing never stopped: journals, notes, essays, ideas, fragments. Something was always unfolding on the page. Zsolt Bugarszki, author of Icarus – The Mars Chronicles, photographed in Singapore. And now, at 53, I’ve finished my first novel. It’s called Icarus. A science fiction story about Mars and the fragile beginnings of a new human civilization. It's the first book in the MÍTOSZ series. A world where the myths, rivalries and hungers of Earth don't stay behind, but follow us to Mars. But Icarus is not about rockets. It’s about people. If you've felt the political weight of Dune, the grounded realism of The Martian, or the scale of The Three-Body Problem, you'll feel at home here, but at the centre, always, are people doing what people have always done. I hold a PhD in social sciences, and I teach social innovation at a polytechnic in Singapore. For more than twenty years I've studied how humans build systems, and how those systems fail. That's what Icarus is really about. Not Mars. Us. My work, and my life, has always centered around human behavior, relationships, systems and change. I could have set this story in any environment: a megacity, a village, a research lab, or a warzone. But I chose Mars. Why? Because Mars is real. And it’s close. Because it forces us to strip away the noise and see what matters. Because when survival becomes the main priority, we see who we really are and what we're truly capable of. Icarus has been a discovery process for me in every sense. I spent countless hours researching Mars, current technology, atmospheric science, closed-loop habitats, quantum AI systems and space infrastructure. The science was my learning curve. But the human dimension was always inside me. And I wanted to share it. Thank you for being here. For stepping into this world. Because the story isn’t mine anymore. It’s yours, too, now. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.

A dome on Mars is not held up by its frame. It is held taut by the air inside it, the way a balloon is. That is why the wind is almost never the danger. In the world of ICARUS, the Russian settlement of Vostok grows its fresh food under such a dome, and a starred note in the Mítosz exhibition explains the same physics. This post goes a little deeper. Martian wind is fast but weak Dust storms on Mars can look terrifying. According to NASA, the strongest winds reach about 60 miles per hour, roughly 100 km/h. But the Martian atmosphere is only about one percent as dense as Earth's, and the push of the wind depends on the density of the air as much as on its speed. At 100 km/h, Martian wind presses on a wall with about 7 pascals. On Earth, a light breeze of around 12 km/h does the same. The storms are still a serious problem, as the notorious Martian dust storms show: they block the Sun and coat everything in dust. They just cannot blow a dome over. The real force comes from inside People need air they can breathe, at a pressure their bodies can live with. If the air inside a dome is kept near sea level pressure on Earth, about 101 kilopascals, it pushes outward on every square metre of the shell with a force of roughly ten tonnes. Outside, almost nothing pushes back. That inside pressure is more than ten thousand times larger than the push of the strongest storm. So a Mars dome behaves like a balloon. Its shell is stretched in tension, and the main engineering problem is the opposite of the one on Earth: not keeping the structure from falling down, but keeping it from lifting off. The edges have to be anchored to the ground or held down by weight. This is one reason why building a human settlement on Mars is first a pressure problem, and only then a weather problem. Panels, seals and the frame In the world of ICARUS, the shell of a dome is made of fused quartz panels held in a metal frame. Quartz glass lets light through for the plants and copes well with heat. The weak points are elsewhere: in the seals between the panels and in the frame that holds them. Mars is hard on joints. Temperatures swing widely between day and night, and glass and metal do not expand at the same rate, so every day the seals are worked back and forth. Martian dust is fine enough to get into every gap. The same is true for every door and hatch on the planet, as Breathe Carefully explains about airlocks. Failure builds quietly A pressurised structure rarely fails in one dramatic blow. A seal slowly loses its elasticity. A small leak grows. A bolt tires after thousands of pressure changes. Because the load is shared across the frame, a rib that gives way passes its share to the ribs next to it. That is why, on Mars, regular inspection and a close watch on the pressure gauge matter more than any wind sensor. The dome of Vostok Nearly a hundred people live in Vostok, in patched-up modules around the greenhouse dome that gives them their fresh food. The first chapter of the novel, When the Sky Turned Red, begins there as a great storm approaches. What happens to the dome, the book tells. You can also visit Vostok in the Mítosz exhibition, where Luna, one of the Twin Robots, guides you across Mars. Source The Fact and Fiction of Martian Dust Storms, NASA, 2015. ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, is available as an ebook here and in paperback on Amazon.