Red Planet Blues

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Mobile Suit Gundam: High Frontier

Life In The Universal Century


Red Planet Blues

While human civilization has colonized cislunar space and established permanent bases among the asteroids and Jovian moons, both Venus and Mars have been largely ignored in the Gundam saga. This oversight remains a mystery.

Mars Direct

To date, the lone exception is Hajime Katoki’s manga side story Gundam F90, which centers around the Mars Autonomous Squadron, which is sent to Mars from the Frontier I colony in Side 4 (L1) to hunt down and destroy the Oldsmobile Army in UC 0111.

Oldsmobile’s group of Zeon revenants used the Martian super-volcano Olympus Mons as its refuge following the Zeon defeat three decades earlier. While they have a base on Mars sufficient to maintain and repair their Mobile Suits and spaceships, the Zeon revenants do not appear to have established a true colony or any presence.

And, despite the Zeon use of the planet, the Federation doesn’t establish any military or civilian presence anywhere on or around Mars, even on the asteroid-like moonlets, before or after this particular incident.


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Last Update: 01 January 2020

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3 thoughts on “Red Planet Blues”

  1. I think the Gundam universe is based around the assumption that planets are less useful than space habitats. If you spend all that time and energy getting from earth into space, and you can build huge, edenic cties there, then what’s the point in going back down into the gravity well of a planet that’s ivariably a cruddier place than earth?

    Gravity. Yuck! Planets. Yuck!

    1. Although the asteroids provide most of what the space habitats require in the way of natural resources, Earth has something that no other planet has: abundant water and a breathable atmosphere. When the Zeon invades, they only took over a few Terrestrial cities as bases of operation from which to direct their real goal: mining and agricultural facilities. I suspect that they were compressing air and send it back home for the nitrogen.

      If you want to extend the Nazi comparison that was only hinted at in the original series but become more and more overt until it became unmistakable by the time Gundam 0080, the Zeon viewed Earth was a combination of the German Reich’s eastern “Lebensraum” and Imperial Japan’s Manchuria. Originally a colony of Erth, they now saw Earth as their colony, to by exploited for the greater glory of their expanding extraterrestrial Principality.

  2. It’s nice to see such a recent post on this fine site, about the best Gundam site there is.

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