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Mars is closer than at any time in recorded history, but is it receding in our imagination? Date published: 8/27/2003
TODAY--OR, for optical purposes, tonight--Mars will be closer to Earth than at any time in the past 60,000 years. If the night is clear, Mars will appear brighter than any star and will outshine everything in the sky but the moon and Venus. If happenstance or clouds prevent your seeing the Red Planet this evening, stay fit, eat healthy, and hope for the best--the next time Mars will be this close is Aug. 28, 2287. Definitely stop smoking. But how close are Earthlings really to Mars? It's true that the Hubble Space Telescope will be snapping away tonight like a Dubuque tourist in Paris, and that NASA's Mars Orbiter is mapping the planet, two U.S. rovers are racing Marsward, and NASA is planning robotic missions to Mars stretching over two decades. But in some fundamental human sense, we seem farther from Mars now than in 1969, when Neil Armstrong walked on another world, or in 1989, when the first President Bush called for a manned mission to Mars. We never got to Mars. We abandoned the moon. The modern political climate scrubs such liftoffs. The romantics are not presently helpful. In the 1950s and '60s they lined up--like the Earth and Mars in their current opposition to the sun--with the nerds (they of the buck-fifty haircuts and the pocket protectors) quite propitiously. Ray Bradbury's short stories and especially the paperback reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs' swashbuckling Martian novels dovetailed with the rise of American rocketry and the Apollo program. America, said Georges Clemenceau, was the only nation to have gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Not so. A half-century ago, our national specialty was to dream fantastic dreams, put them to blueprint, and achieve them as no previous civilization ever did. John Carter and John Kennedy were first cousins, and it seemed but a short ride from Cape Canaveral to a dead sea bottom where six-limbed giants menaced beautiful princesses with names like Tara of Helium and Llana of Gathol. Astronaut school? Sign us up!
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