Mars in 1995?

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Here's a curiosity--the cover story of the June 11, 1981 issue of Analog.  It wasn't fiction. "Mars in 1995!" by Bob Parkinson, with illustrations by David A. Hardy, was a sober explanation of how a manned mission to Mars would be feasible, only 14 years after that issue of the magazine came out. And though it didn't happen, many of the details of the imagined project showed up in subsequent robotic missions.

For me, the most interesting part of the article is a bit of background presented close to the beginning:

In 1970, at the height of its success with Apollo, NASA outlined its plans for a manned expedition to Mars before the end of the century. That was the pessimistic scenario--actually, they hoped that the first expedition would take place around 1987.

Alas, such plans required nuclear boosters, which for complicated reasons never came about. 

Perhaps this was just as well. We know a lot more about the long-term effects of living in space than we did in 1981, and it looks like such a voyage might require medical interventions that don't yet exist.

Still... The article is a glimpse back into a more optimistic era. Here's what Parkinson had to say about what the pessimists expected:

There are many in the space business who imagine that such an expedition belongs to the twenty-first century. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, they say, we may just be returning to the moon.

Thirty years later, we haven't yet done that either.

 

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