Mars Flag

Last modified: 2002-03-08 by phil nelson
Keywords: mars | planet: mars |
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by Jorge Candeias

• FOTW Vexillological Reference

The First Salute: Martian Flag Flies in Space

During its brilliantly successful Christmas mission to refurbish and repair the Hubble Space Telescope, the Space Shuttle Discovery carried a Martian flag into orbit for the first time.

The Martian flag carried aboard Discovery was a red, green and blue tricolor, with the vertical red segment closest to the mast, followed by the green, and then the blue. Its form was originally suggested to Mars Society president Robert Zubrin by Mars Arctic Research Station task force leader Pascal Lee during their summer 1999 site selection expedition to Devon Island. The red, green and blue colors derive from stages of Mars' transformation from barrenness to life depicted in the epic "Red Mars," "Green Mars," "Blue Mars" trilogy written by Kim Stanley Robinson. Red, green and blue are also the primary components of the spectrum, symbolizing unity in diversity, as well as light itself, and thus reason and enlightenment. The tricolor form also traditionally represents the republican values of liberty, equality and justice. The flag was sewn by Maggie Zubrin and brought aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery at the invitation of astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld.

For more information, see the Mars Society website.

Astronauts are allowed to manifest several items of special importance on Space Shuttle flights of an official nature.
Jim Burk, 06 January 2000
The Mars Society

Red stands for the current desert, green for a 2nd step planet with vegetation and blue for the fully terraformed blue planet Mars.
Jorge Candeias, 11 April 2001

Following the link I provided recently on Robinson's trilogy, I got to another site, even better than the first one. There, I found this page:

http://www.geocities.com/fra_nl/history.html

where the following can be read:

Martian Flags

by Jorge Candeias

The first Martian flag, a red circle on a black background, was designed by Mark Knoke in the late twentieth century. Clearly inspired by the Japanese banner, it's obvious what it stands for: a red planet in the blackness of space. Throughout the twenty-first century the flag was used by the Mars Society, the colonists and Unacodema.

by Jorge Candeias

When Mars gained independence in 2100, the need was felt for a new flag that had more relation with the current state of the planet, on which the colors green and blue were establishing their position next to the original red. With the green of the vegetation more or less positioned in between the northern seas and the red south, one could argue that the planet designed it's own flag. A diagramatic representation of the four supervolcanoes and Valles Marineris was added.

I have no idea if this appears in the books, but I don't think so.
Jorge Candeias, 5 November 2001