WI James Lovelock after he got famous for gaia theory didnt set up a party based on the gaia theory?
In that case, the elaborate attempt to bootstrap together multistage boosters for CFC terraforming payloads by way of aged ICBMs would probably never have been attempted.
It may have seemed like an inexpensive, worthwhile initiative at the time, but it was both a distraction from more practical martian initiatives and the spectacular launch failures disillusioned the public.
Imagine if Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" proposal had been adopted instead of Lovelock's project. For a small fraction of the price, we might not have begun a terraforming regime, but we could certainly have had multiple martian surveying missions by now, setting the stage for eventual colonization.