by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: February 22, 2008   Last Updated: June 02, 2008

The Cold War race to put a man on the moon inspired a generation to gaze upwards and ponder our place in the heavens. It was an outstanding technical achievement and the sight of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface was an event that transfixed the globe and had us marvelling at how clever we were. For a flickering moment, all of human-kind, well at least those with access to a television, was united and squabbles over political and religious differences were forgotten.

In Australia, school children were given the day off and I remember families from up and down the street crowded into our loungeroom to watch Apollo XI's historic landing. When Neil Armstrong's historic words crackled out of the television speakers, everyone cheered and there was much backslapping and a few tears. It was truly one of those defining moments of history that made you proud to be alive and part of the human race.

The discussions afterwards, standing around a smoky barbeque in suburban Sydney (in case you are wondering, July is the middle of winter for us, but often mild enough to enjoy a meal and a few drinks outside), turned to the inevitable: and now what? The space race, which sprang into the collective consciousness following the successful launch of Sputnik I in 1957, had consumed our hearts and souls for half a generation, but it was over. Mission accomplished.

Eyes turned further afield. Between 1960 and 1962, both the US and the then Soviet Union had sent probes to both Mars and Venus and the consensus of the next likely step was a manned mission to another planet, most likely Mars. Though not our closest neighbour, Venus, with its cloying atmospheric blanket of carbon dioxide and surface temperatures of around 460 degrees Celsius, was never going to be an option. Mars, with its Earth-like seasons, varies from -140 degrees Celsius in winter to 20 degrees Celsius in summer and is a much more viable proposition in terms of human brings being able to actually stand on the surface (without being fried or frozen). There was even talk within NASA and I recall former US President Richard Nixon of future manned missions to Mars.

The expectation at the time was that, by the turn of the century, this would be a common occurrence and we would probably be starting to think about exploring further afield, perhaps something interstellar. The 1960s and early 1970s were a period where we'd taken our first tentative steps beyond the safety of our own planet and it was expected to

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