^ Interesting, in that the Trekverse has a manned mission to Saturn *before* the missions to Mars...
Things that are different in Trek history
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^Shawn Christopher headed the first Saturn mission, but it could have been unmanned instrument probe, with him being the director of the project.
I would perfer it was a spacecraft with a crew.
Maybe they went to Saturn first because of that black monolith they found on the moon?
I would perfer it was a spacecraft with a crew.
Maybe they went to Saturn first because of that black monolith they found on the moon?
......like a slap on the back from Doctor Spock........
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I heard that there is an explanation (in the novel The Rings of Time) as to why NASA went to Saturn before it went to Mars. Can anyone confirm? I haven't read it yet.
^ I read it, but unfortunately I don't remember the reason. According to MB, though:
Did "One Small Step" ever claim Ares IV was the first mission to Mars? As Chemahkuu mentioned, there should have also been an Ares I, II and III, and there could have been Mars missions before the Ares program, too. If sleeper ships were obsolete by 2018 in the Trekverse, I'm sure they had been to Mars prior to 2032.
Real reason, of course, is that the Saturn mission was mentioned in TOS, when the "early 21st century" seemed a long time away, and the Ares IV mission was from VOY, so they used a date that seemed plausibly in the future from their vantage point of the late '90s, even though it didn't mesh with TOS so well.
Memory Beta said:
Did "One Small Step" ever claim Ares IV was the first mission to Mars? As Chemahkuu mentioned, there should have also been an Ares I, II and III, and there could have been Mars missions before the Ares program, too. If sleeper ships were obsolete by 2018 in the Trekverse, I'm sure they had been to Mars prior to 2032.
Real reason, of course, is that the Saturn mission was mentioned in TOS, when the "early 21st century" seemed a long time away, and the Ares IV mission was from VOY, so they used a date that seemed plausibly in the future from their vantage point of the late '90s, even though it didn't mesh with TOS so well.
It's possible, if the Ares IV mission is not described as the first to Mars, that it is the first to achieve some noteworthy goal on Mars, like the founding of the first Mars colony. This is, of course, only speculation.
What I find completely ironic is that if the fans hadn't gotten the first Space Shuttle renamed from Constitution to Enterprise, the plans at the time was for one of the later space-worthy shuttles to actually be named Enterprise!
So, the irony is that the spaceworthy Enterprise could have had chances of blowing up or disintegrating on reentry? Eh... it's fine the way it was.
I should note that there is a distinct lack of primary evidence that there was ever any intention of naming the first space shuttle Constitution. The original source is certainly press reporting from the orbiter's public rollout in September 1976, but I've never found any documents indicating when Constitution was pencilled in as a name, or by who.
Another explanation would be that at the time TOS was on the air the American (and Russian) space programs were roaring at a fantastic pace.
That Humanity would have interplanetary travel in a very few decades would have seem quite reasonable to Roddenberry and the people watching the show.
The thought that the American space program would basically die in less than a decade would have been inconceivable to them.
Constitution was NASA's chosen name for the shuttle prototype, this is why NASA scheduled the roll out date for September 17, which is Constitution Day.
Even after President Ford changed the name (and he did change it) the shuttle Enterprise still rolled out on Constitution Day.
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It's not stated either way if Ares IV was the first manned mission to land on Mars, but it was apparently an important milestone. Note that in the real world, the manned Apollo 7 and 9 missions never left Earth orbit, and Apollo 8 and 10 only orbited the Moon without landing.
Of course had we stayed on Apollo style budgets we just might be doing a mars mission.
Steppenwolf will withstand the test of time.
The 2014 budget appropriation for NASA is about $16.6 billion. In 1965 and 1966 NASA was getting approximately four percent of the government budget.
Four percent today would be around 152 billion dollars.
Going to Mars? We'd be going to Pluto.
I'd be okay with that.
Because he was Born...
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