Help us keep Tales of
Future Past going and growing with your donation to our bandwidth fund.
Custom Search
The Collier's Mars mission was essentially
their Moon plan written on a grander scale. This is no sign of
laziness, although the ships with "Moon Mission" hastily scratched out
and "Mars Thingee" added does indicate some haste.
Actually,
once you haul all the gear into orbit, the difference between getting
to the Moon and getting to Mars is largely a question of additional
fuel and travel time. It's not a small difference, mind you, but
the basic engineering is pretty much the same.
For the Mars mission, another flotilla of
spaceships would be assembled in Earth orbit. This time there
would be a pair of ships with a crew of twelve for an eight month
journey to the red planet. On board would be all the supplies
needed for the nearly three year round trip, including lots and lots
of crossword puzzles.
On
reaching Mars, the return ship would remain in space while the winged
landing craft would separate from its boosters before gliding to a
safe landing on the Martian polar ice cap. "Safe"
including coming in for a dead-stick approach at 120 miles per
hour on questionable ice tens of millions of miles from the nearest
Automobile Association phone.
Once
on the surface, the explorers spend one year exploring, looking at
sand, detaching the rocket they'll use to rendezvous with the
return ship, looking at sand, putting up a dome, looking at sand, and
, uh, looking at sand.
