Going To Mars, Hopefully

BACK WHEN I WAS eleven or twelve years old, in the mid nineteen sixties, I just knew that not only would we soon land on the moon, I also knew, just knew, that soon after the moon landing somebody would land on and walk on Mars. I fell in love with science fiction, and like many of my generation, was extremely interested in the Apollo space program. I had the flu on Christmas Day, 1968, I think it was, but the three astronauts orbiting the moon cheered me up. Those guys must have longed to land on the surface as it floated beneath them, but that wasn't their job. That came next, in 1969, as the world watched on fuzzy, blurry television. Certainly, I assumed, by 1990 humans would be living on Mars. I was further certain that I would someday visit and maybe even live on them both. In the nineteen sixties, the year 2017 seemed like an extremely remote, futuristic date, which would doubtless be exotic and filled with high tech scientific miracles. I don't recall anticipating the smart phone, Facebook, or the internet. But I did foresee colonies on the moon and Mars. So much for futurism. Now, I'm starting to wonder whether anybody will walk on Mars during my lifetime, and it depresses me. There is, however, hope. I think I have at least an outside chance to see it. Various tycoons, people like Elon Musk and others, are talking about a Mars mission within a decade. NASA is talking about a manned Mars mission by 2040. I'll be very old by then, but if I keep taking vitamins and go easy on the booze, who knows? The second man to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, said it best: "History will remember the inhabitants of the twentieth century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in sixty six years, only to languish for the next thirty in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve." Maybe so, but let's hope the people of the early twenty first century are someday remembered as the people who went to Mars. And let's hope it happens before I die.