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Introduction
Introduction
Most of you are familiar with the 1969 recommendations of the Space Task Group that the U.S. accept a post-Apollo goal of manned planetary exploration before the end of the century (…) What if, instead of rejecting that report out of hand in the aftermath of Apollo, Nixon said, “Yes, we’ll do that.” What might have happened? There is a fascinating book called by British engineer Stephen Baxter that starts with exactly this premise. The novel describes the first mission to Mars in the 1980s! It’s a very enjoyable piece of counterfactual history.”
NASA historian John Logsdon, 2001
Most of NASA’s budget had been sucked into manned spaceflight. Unmanned projects had been subordinated to the needs of the Mars mission or cut altogether. They had lost a gravity-assist flight to Venus and Mercury, asteroid and comet encounters, Grand Tour probes to the outer planets. The Large Space Telescope, a big Earth-orbital eye, had also been axed.
Sure, humans were on the way to Mars. But humanity knew nothing of the rest of the Solar System it hadn’t known in 1957: the moon of Jupiter and Saturn remained points of light in the sky, the disks and rings of the giant worlds a telescopic blur.”