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If the Moon was Mount Everest, then Mars was the
New World. Let's face it, in their more sober moments even the
most die-hard space enthusiast was well aware that the Moon was an
airless ball of dust and the most you were ever going to get out of it
was the odd astronomical observatory and the ubiquitous ill thought
out mining operation.
Mars was something else again, however.
Until the 1960s, it was still widely thought that Mars was at least
marginally habitable. True, the idea of civilisations are
Mars was beginning to die out and falling back on the last ramparts of
the "finding the ruins of a dead world" argument, but it was
reasonable to think that plants, animals, and even liquid water might,
just might,
still be found on the surface. The air might be thin, but it
might be no harder to cope with than living on an extremely tall and
cold mountain. It was easy to think of a future Mars inhabited
by colonists walking about on the surface with little more than
futuristic snow suits and oxygen tanks. The Moon was a goal to
conquer. Mars was world to win; a replay of a somewhat more arid
American frontier.
Artwork copyright©
Bonestell Space Art, used with
permission
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