Martian dreams

Artist's conception of manned base on Mars.
Clarke, The Exploration of Space

The year 2020 will be known as the Year of the Pandemic, of course, but it may also be known as the year of renewed Martian exploration.  NASA will launch its Mars lander "Perseverance" on Thursday.  The payload rover -- packed with scientific instruments, including 23 cameras and a helicopter, and weighing about 2,300 pounds --will make a controlled, soft landing in Jezero crater, with an ETA of February 2021.

"Perseverance" won't be alone.  The United Arab Emirates sent a Martian orbiter, "Hope," into space on July 20, and China sent a lander with a rover of its own, "Tianwen-1," into space on July 23, with an ETA the same month as "Perseverance.".  All of a sudden, after years of inertia and lack of funding, the world's interest has once more turned to the "conquest" of Mars.  China also has made it clear that it has another form of "victory" in mind -- catching up with the USA in the exploration of space.

It can't come too soon for me.  As I've lamented in past essays, I was a space nut as a kid, and I was fully convinced that we would have a manned base on Mars by now.  When I was in second and third grades, I had read all the kids' books on the stars and planets in the public library -- although I was too young to really get into similar books in the adult section.  As I recounted a year ago, at the age of 12, I read with enthusiasm Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 book, The Exploration of Space, which not only  suggested that mankind would have bases on Mars by now, but included his artist's conception (inset above).

The Apollo program put us on the Moon in 1969.  Could Mars be far behind?

Along with my childhood astronomy readings, I was also a budding fan of science fiction.  Some sci-fi was pretty realistic in its science and in its predictions.  Some was laughable, even to a child, like the 1950 movie Rocketship X-M, where a first visit to the moon goes off-course and lands on a barbarian-inhabited Mars by mistake.  Others, such as the collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, were obviously -- even to my immature mind -- intended as fantasy.  Fantasy that presented Bradbury's philosophical and ethical concerns in the context of space travel.  Still, who knew what we would find on Mars?  Maybe not the telepathic shapeshifters invented by Bradbury in one of his scarier stories.  But beyond that, the possibilities seemed endless.

Well, we've been dinking around on Mars with unmanned robots for quite a while now.  We've discovered a lot of interesting and unexpected facts.  But we can pretty well rule out any intelligent life, or any present day life at all.  But NATO scientists hope to determine whether life in some form may have existed in the past, when the Martian surface was apparently rich in water.  With an atmosphere and water and nutrients in the soil, is it possible that no life at all would have evolved, even at the microbial level?  Will we remain doomed, at least until we can leave the Solar System, to the loneliness of being the only known intelligent life in the Universe?

However successful any or all of this year's Martian probes prove to be, my childhood dream of seeing mankind on Mars will not be accomplished.  Not this year, and almost certainly not in my lifetime.  "Perseverance" will take soil samples and insert them in small metal tubes for transport back to Earth.  But "Perseverance" itself will have no means of returning.  The soil samples will be stacked up nearby, awaiting a later, more sophisticated flight -- still an unmanned robot -- that will pick up the samples and put them into Martian orbit, where eventually another flight will grab them out of orbit and return them to Earth.

Optimistically, NASA hopes to get those soil samples -- gathered in 2021 -- back on Earth for intensive analysis in 2031.  I may still be around, and still interested in space travel.  But I will have long since given up ever seeing a manned landing on Mars -- let alone a manned colony on the planet.

You were a smart guy, Mr. Clarke.  But you missed the call on this one. 

Unless, of course, the fear of China's establishing a manned Martian station of its own before we do drives us into a Sputnik-like fever of competition. 

Never underestimate the power of selfish motives!