A Soft Landing on Bradbury’s Mars
When I was a kid, my sister used to read books to me, like “Lord of the Rings”, and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”. That book made a huge impression on me, and to this day is maybe my all-time favorite book. If you’ve never read Bradbury’s masterwork, you should. Classic is a pretty light word for this one. It presents a vision of the human colonization of Mars, through loosely related short stories, several of which were written to stand on their own as they were originally published in science fiction magazines of the 1940s and ’50s. They’re not quite what you’d expect, strangely more like poetry than prose fiction. All rooted in the characters of the people who went to Mars and the people they met when they arrived there. It formed in my mind that Mars was a place to build roads and schools and even the occasional hotdog stand.
In August of 2003, Mars made its closest approach to the Earth in a 60,000 year period. At 2:00 AM, I stood on my deck, my 8-inch Dobsonian telescope perched on a picnic table to give it an all-important extra couple feet of height, sighting over the hill to the south of my house. I looked through the eyepiece and saw Mars as I had never seen it before. Big and clear, with sharp surface mottling and a clearly visible ice cap. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen through a telescope, and I’ve seen some pretty amazing things.
A few hours ago, on the north-polar plain of Mars, NASA successfully soft-landed the first probe since the Viking missions in 1976 to use retrorockets, rather than than a landing bag. A safe landing by any method on Mars is an elusive proposition. This one came off beautifully, and early reports indicate its surroundings look ideal for its mission of searching for signs of water and life in the Martian past.
Although the Viking missions gave us a different view of Mars than Bradbury possessed when he wrote his stories, I still see Mars as a place people from Earth must inevitably settle. Not just land there, plant a flag, and take some rocks, but establish a permanent presence. For reasons stretching from the human need to explore to the long-term survival of our species we need to follow in the wake of the Phoenix Mars Lander and build roads and schools and hotdog stands in the rust-colored soil of our nearest planetary neighbor.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
