Mon - September 22, 2003

It would be for exploring Mars, I thought. Mars was the ultimate prize. Imagination sparked by the novels of H.G Wells and Jules Verne (and innumerable science fiction movies), I saw myself pitching a tent in the Valleris Marineris or climbing to the rim of Olympus Mons. This wasn't fantasy; it was future reality. I was going to Mars one day as surely as I was going to school then. Just a matter of time.

Perhaps history enjoys toying with dreamers. Leonardo da Vinci drew plans during the Renaissance for an operable flying machine. Yet it took centuries after his death before two brothers finally clawed their way into the air at Kitty Hawk. He could not have imagined that the leap would take so long. Nor could I have dreamed that we would leave the Moon in 1972, never to return.

"Can it really have been thirty one years since Apollo 17?" I wondered as my wife and I drove to a quiet park where we could view the planet Mars, then 34.6 million miles away—closer than ever in 60,000 years. Closer to me. Yet I felt no closer to it.

Not that Mars exploration hasn't advanced in my lifetime. Quite the contrary. The two Viking landers which reached Mars in 1976 sent back thousands of photographs and—controversially—even may have detected bacterial life there. The 1997 Mars Pathfinder rovers crawled a tiny swab of the planet like remote-controlled roller skates, returning more than 16,000 images from the lander and 550 from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks. Mars Exploration Rovers named Spirit and Opportunity launched this summer and should land at Meridiani Planum in January if all goes as planned. They will be followed in 2007 by Mars Scout, a mission to explore the high northern latitudes.

But robots can't transport a boy from here to Mars at the speed of his imagination. Manned space exploration takes time, research, and a lot of thought. Because sending a living creature into an airless, waterless vacuum filled with scorching radiation is—as Kennedy suggested—one of the most difficult things the species will ever do. Something that can't be rushed.

Human progress takes time; Mars is eternal. My wife and I took turns gazing through our feeble telescope, shivering against the midnight cold, and wondering at the same silver, featureless disk that tantalized our cave-dwelling ancestors as they too huddled for warmth. Sixty thousand years seems like eternity to man, but it's nothing to a universe that measures time in eons.

"I'm cold," my wife said. And I felt cold too. Not merely from the frosty air but because I was experiencing the same sense of loss Da Vinci must have felt on the day he grasped that he would never fly. Humans will live on Mars, I realized, but I suddenly appreciated that I would not. Born too early. Died too young. Resident in the "between-time"—the time between the seeming impossibility of space flight problems and the comfortable certainty of knowing their answers.

That discovery left me feeling very old.

Several families with young children had come to the park to peer at Mars too. As they crowded around their telescopes, jockeying for position, one of the urchins—a boy not even seven—asked the only question that must have seemed relevant.

"Daddy, can I go to Mars?"

"Yes," the father said. "Perhaps you will."

The child considered this for a moment.

"Will you come with me?"

The man frowned slightly. He looked about my age.

"Sure," he said. "Your mother will come too."

And I think he answered truthfully. Because the first humans who step on the surface of Mars will not get there alone. They'll stand on the shoulders of everyone who ever dreamed of paddling down real Martian canals and living La Vida Roja. They'll carry aboard their rocket the hopes, dreams, and prayers of an entire species.

Mars returns to this spot in another 60,000 years. But we won't wait that long to reach her.

I bet that the view of Earth from Olympus Mons will be spectacular.