What if the first people to live on Mars are not astronauts in shiny suits, but tough Russian shift workers from the frozen oil fields of Yamal and Taimyr?

For more than forty years, these men have survived minus fifty degrees, months of total isolation, broken machines, polar nights, and blizzards that swallow entire airports. They sleep on airport floors wrapped in newspapers, repair rigs with duct tape and swearing, and keep working when the rest of the world would quit.

In Shift Workers Will Fly to Mars, Ferik Mur takes you inside the brutal, funny, and strangely beautiful world of the Russian shift worker — the closest thing Earth has to real Martians.

This is not science fiction.

This is a field report from the edge of human endurance.

If humanity ever wants to build a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet, it should stop looking at elite cosmonauts

and start looking at the guys who already live like Martians on Earth.