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The Program

The Mars Program

Just five hundred years ago, mars was a dot, a speck of light. Then came the first telescopes, and mars ceased to be a dot. It became, instead, a world which scientists claimed was much like our own.

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The Mars Program

Just five hundred years ago, mars was a dot, a speck of light. Then came the first telescopes, and mars ceased to be a dot. It became, instead, a world which scientists claimed was much like our own. Imaginations ran wild, and before long, rather than see vast, wonderful possibilities, we feared a Martian attack. As a war of the worlds loomed, Mars became a source of fear and anxiety.

It wasn’t until our first stumblings into the solar system in the 1960s, when Mariner 4 snapped photos of Mars’s surface that we caught a glimpse of what it might actually be like. Rather than an advanced civilization poised for an attack, Mariner 4 showed us a lifeless, desolate place. A few years later, in the 1970s, Viking I confirmed those first impressions: Mars was nothing to fear. Just a dead planet; barely worth exploring. The missions stopped. The scientific dreamers lost sleep and became depressed.

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