But WildBlue Communications' satellite Internet service may have contributed to the task of getting there. Earlier this month, Farmers Telephone Co. in Pleasant View, CO, installed a WildBlue dish in support of a two-week project designed to bring a Mars launch closer to reality.

"We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later," said Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society, Boulder, CO, quoted earlier this week in the Washington Times. "Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade."

The Mars Society is a nonprofit group with chapters around the world made up of people who believe the time has come to go to Mars and learn what there is to be learned. One of the group's activities has been to seek places on Earth with Mars-like conditions to anticipate the challenges astronauts might face.

One such place, the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) near Hanksville, Utah, is colleting data and experience that might be invaluable during a future interplanetary expedition.

The more remote, the better: the group seeks places that, like Mars, have no connection to civilization, including no radio waves from telephone and electric lines, cell phones, or broadcast stations. Satellite technology is the only way Mars Society research teams can communicate with the outside world from such places.

AustroMars, a group of Austrian researchers, contacted Farmers Telephone General Manager Douglas Pace to help with a specific project at the Utah facility. The group had developed a land rover, somewhat like the robotic devices NASA now has crawling on the Martian surface.

The Austrian team was testing a new design that involved setting up a wireless local area network to control from the rover from the work base/residential unit at the Utah site. However, the group wanted to take the project a step further by setting up remote control via Internet through its "mission control" in Salzburg. WildBlue proved to be the solution.

Pace started with Farmers Telephone a few months ago and is still learning about the WildBlue business and its capabilities. He had never been on a WildBlue install before, but when the MARS job came along, he told himself, "This is one I can't pass up."

As it turned out, however, the first attempt to install service was a wasted trip - rained out. The decision whether to return the next day was not automatic. The MARS site is 400 miles roundtrip from Farmers Telephone's offices.

That evening, Pace happened to be meeting with the company's board. Their reaction: of course, go back. "This is such a unique opportunity. It was too difficult to say no, that's out of our area," he said. (In fact, Farmers Telephone was the closest WildBlue provider.)

WildBlue not only worked for the intended remote-control purpose, but AustroMars members also used it for video file transfers and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Satellite signal latency usually precludes VoIP over WildBlue, but the system significantly outperformed earlier-generation Ku-band satellite Internet that Mars Society researchers had been using, Pace said.

Once the Farmers installers completed the connection, the researchers "were whooping and hollering about how great it worked," Pace said.

As of last week, the AustroMars group completed its Utah mission. Many other scientific groups, including NASA, regularly use the facility. Pace says that the Mars Society is in the process of transferring the Austrian Group's WildBlue account so that other researchers will have the benefit of fast, robust satellite Internet service.

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