Ares Tower
Global headquarters. Sixty-two floors of engineering, operations and the Office of the CEO.
- On-campus residences and sleep pods
- Free room and board for operations staff
- 24/7 dining on six floors
Company · Est. 2017 · Houston, Texas
We build
We build
the road.
Ares Frontier exists to give ordinary people a future on another world. Not tourists. Not billionaires. Welders, nurses, teachers, geologists and families who want a second chance and are willing to work for it.
Mission
Build a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars within a generation, and make room in it for anyone willing to work for it.
Nearly nine billion people share a planet that has left most of them behind. We think the answer is not a better screen or a smarter machine. It is opportunity, and the oldest version of it there is: new land, and the freedom to build on it.
38,400
Employees on Earth1,314
Residents on Mars47
Titan flights1,180
Talos units builtHow we work
Four rules.
Printed on the wall of every Ares Frontier facility, from the 62nd floor of Ares Tower to the suitlocks at Beagle.
RULE 01We never repeat a mistake.
Every failure is paid for exactly once. We learn as much as possible from each loss, fix it, and move on. The magic is in never giving up.
RULE 02We make our own luck.
Schedules are promises. Nobody hands you a launch window; you earn it in the months before.
RULE 03One company. One network.
Ares Frontier and Nexus share infrastructure end to end. One identity, one set of credentials, one system from the warehouse to the airlock.
RULE 04The frontier is for everyone.
Like the settlers who went west, the people who build Mars will come from everywhere. We turn no one away who is willing to work.
History
Fourteen years, two worlds.
- 2017HoustonFounded in a Nexus warehouse
Kael Osterman starts Ares Frontier with forty engineers, a converted Nexus fulfillment center and one question: what would it take to move a town to Mars?
- 2019BrownsvilleFirst Hephaestus hot fire
The HX-1 runs for 3.8 seconds at Talos Works. Two years later, HX-3 runs for six minutes.
- 2021–24Test campaignTwenty-three test flights
The Titan orbital test campaign flies twenty-three times. Six vehicles undergo Spontaneous Reconfiguration. Each one teaches us something we never have to learn twice.
- 2025NASDAQAres Frontier goes public
ARFX lists on the NASDAQ. Ares Tower, sixty-two floors with on-campus residences for operations staff, opens in downtown Houston.
- 2026Window 1Three Titans land at Elysium
Three uncrewed Titans touch down in Elysium Planitia. Talos crews unpack and assemble the habitats before anyone arrives.
- 2027Cohort 1The 84
The first crewed mission to another planet is lost during landing, after a planet-wide dust storm alters atmospheric density over the landing site. We remember all eighty-four of them.
- 2027Block 2The nose thruster
Eleven weeks after the accident, Block 2 adds a nose attitude thruster and new landing weather criteria. We keep the Phase Two schedule.
- 2028WashingtonPardons for Passports
The White House calls. Ares Frontier becomes the founding partner of Pardons for Passports, and Cohort 2 enrollment grows by sixty-four percent.
- 2029Window 2Elysium is founded
Cohort 2 lands. 1,314 people become the first residents of a city on Mars. Ares Link and ORACLE go live, and Elysium becomes the first settlement run by fully autonomous mission operations.
- 2030Utopia PlanitiaPromethea site selected
Orbital radar confirms a buried ice sheet in Utopia Planitia. Talos crews begin the pre-arrival build.
- 2031Window 3Twelve for twelve
Cohort 3 launches for Promethea at a cadence of one Titan every three days.
In memoriam · Cohort 1 · 2027
84
The first people to travel to another planet did not live to walk on it. They knew the risks better than anyone, and they went anyway. Every Titan that has landed safely since carries a nose thruster that exists because of them. Their names are etched into the base of the Arcadia dome at Promethea.
A. AdeyemiR. AlvaradoK. AndersenM. AsanteJ. BarrowT. BellamyS. BhattL. BoatengC. BrennanD. CalderE. CastilloH. ChaoN. ClementP. CortésR. DagherV. DelacroixM. DlaminiF. EastonI. EkwuemeG. FalkA. FaroukB. FenwickY. FujitaO. GalloR. GarrityS. GutiérrezJ. HalvorsenK. HaddadW. HartleyL. HerreraM. IbarraT. IqbalE. JanssenR. JoshiA. KamauD. KerrS. KowalH. LaineB. LazarusC. LeclercJ. LindqvistM. LowryN. MadsenP. MarchettiZ. MbekiA. MercerT. MoreauK. NakamuraF. NavarroO. NwosuL. OakesR. OkoyeS. OrtegaG. PajariE. PetrovM. QuinlanA. RahmanJ. ReyesC. RivasD. RourkeH. SaarV. SalazarK. SatoI. SerranoB. SheridanW. SokolovN. StrandT. SutherlandR. TanakaE. ThorneL. ToureA. UddinM. ValdezS. VargaJ. VosP. WainwrightC. WellerH. WhitlockD. XuY. YilmazR. YoungF. ZamoraK. ZielinskiM. Zubiri
Facilities
Where Mars gets built.
Five campuses on Earth, all on a single network shared with Nexus.
Communications Hub
Every bit between Earth and Mars passes through here: the Mars uplink, Ares Link and the ORACLE platform.
- Deep-space network operations
- Ares Link family messaging
- ORACLE datacenter
Frontier Point
Four launch pads, a 38,000 m³ tank farm and the fastest pad turnaround in the world.
- Pads 39-T, 40-T, 41-T, 42-T
- Booster catch towers
- Public viewing beach
Talos Works
Where we build Hephaestus engines and Talos robots, eleven engines and thirty robots a day.
- Engine test stands
- Talos assembly line
- Heat shield tile plant
Mission Control
Home of the Promethea flight team. Elysium operations run autonomously from the Communications Hub.
- Promethea mission operations
- Landing weather office
- Colonist medical support
Nexus
Our sister company packs every resupply module in its fulfillment centers and moves every part we buy. Plug into any Nexus closet and you're on the Ares Frontier network.
- 214 fulfillment centers
- Autonomous freight fleet
- Shared identity and security
