Chapter Two

'But we've not been travelling to other planets anymore?'

'The Hubble Telescope and Voyager probes have allowed us to explore our little corner of the universe. Only last year we got the first sight of the surface of Pluto. Space research has concentrated on improving our life on Earth. Satellites monitor the environment. They help the rescue services. Military satellites can tell us when a country is building weapons that they shouldn't be. Those things are a great deal more use to us than putting a man on the Moon.'

'So the question seems to be why are the British going back to Mars? Are they hoping to find little green men?' she laughed.

They were nearing the end of the report, Benny realised, and the reporter wanted to end on a lighter note.

'They are five million years too late for that, if they are,' the Professor snorted.

'The findings of the Mariner probes of the nineteen-sixties didn't rule out the possibility that Mars might support human life, but I'm afraid that ten years later the British astronauts and the American Viking unmanned probes proved beyond all doubt that Mars was a barren, radioactive world, at least now. There may have been primitive life, many billions of years ago, but I remain sceptical. Mars is the world most similar to ours in the solar system, but the only water is frozen solid as a rock in the polar regions. I’m afraid that any human being walking on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit would be blasted by radiation, frozen to death by the temperature and then he would suffocated by the lack of atmosphere.'

'Well on that note, it's back to the studio. Thank you gentlemen. This is Eve Waugh, coming live from outside the Mars 97 Mission Control at the British National Space Museum, London, England.'