Astrobiology, the scientific field investigating potential extraterrestrial life, is often understood as a post-Sputnik development initiated by academic molecular biologists anxious to distance themselves from NASA’s quasi-military human spaceflight program. This paper complicates this origin story by examining the first-ever set of astrobiology experiments, which were carried out by the United States Air Force (USAF) in the mid-1950s. At the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) in Texas, physiologists and microbiologists led by ex-Luftwaffe researcher Hubertus Strughold constructed small environmental simulations of Mars, and sealed hardy terrestrial microbes inside the freezing, desiccated, low-pressure, nitrogen-rich containers to see if any could survive. First called a ‘Marsarium’, after the terrariums used in colonial plant transportation, the name that stuck was ‘Mars Jar’. More than an academic exercise, the Air Force scientists used Mars Jar studies to understand what sort of life future astronauts might encounter on expeditions to the Red Planet, and how it could be used instrumentally to establish a military base there. Building on recent scholarship about the work of virtual representations of Mars by Janet Vertesi and Lisa Messeri, the story of these early physical simulations shows how astrobiology emerged as a Cold War military concern, and built-up Mars as a potential battlefield among other strategically-valuable extreme environments America needed to defend like the polar regions and the deep seas. Most crucially, it reveals ways that present-day astrobiology, focused on Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, retains an unchecked colonial gaze and instrumental regard for extraterrestrial life.
