At the time, the Apollo 11 Moon landing seemed like the ultimate expression of human courage, ingenuity and the will to boldly go forward – a “giant leap for mankind”, as Neil Armstrong put it on July 21, 1969.
However, even as America and the USSR were vying to win the space race, engineers on both sides of the Iron Curtain had their sights set on the tougher challenge of reaching Mars.
It took the US eight years to achieve president John F Kennedy’s goal of getting a man to the Moon and back – yet we are still years from the possibility of setting foot on the Red Planet.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first successful attempt to send an unmanned spaceship to Mars.
Starting in 1960, a year before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, there were five failed attempts by the USSR to reach Mars before the US pulled it off in 1965.
On July 17, Nasa’s Mariner 4 passed within 9,846 kilometres of the planet’s surface, almost four years before Apollo 11 blasted off from the Kennedy Space Centre for its historic voyage to the Moon.
If the race to the Moon was a sprint, there are now signs that we may be in the last laps of our marathon – an attempt to set foot on our nearest vaguely habitable planetary neighbour.
Last week Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 became the second man on the Moon, revealed his part in plans to turn Mars into Earth’s first extraterrestrial colony by July 20, 2039 – the 70th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Almost certainly Aldrin, who is 85, will not be around to see it but if the plan becomes a reality, a baby born this month could be celebrating his or her 25th birthday in humanity’s first home away from home.
Mars is the only hospitable planet within realistic striking distance from Earth. Venus is closer but with an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth and a surface temperature nudging 500°C, the planet would crush and cook a human being instantly.
Mars, meanwhile, has gripped the human imagination for millennia, long before a now forgotten Roman gazed up at the night sky and decided that the only red light among the white stars and planets had to be his people’s god of war and named the planet accordingly.
The name stuck, although the idea had already occurred to others. The Red Planet was already significant in the mythologies of those including the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Egyptians.
Now life on that distant red dot is within our reach.
Between 1969 and 1971, Nasa landed 12 men on the Moon. Four of them are dead – Armstrong died in 2012, at the age of 82 – and the youngest of the survivors will be 80 next month.
Last week, Aldrin announced that he was joining the Florida Institute of Technology to develop a “master plan” to present to Nasa for colonising Mars by 2039. It was good timing. Nasa intends to send the first human beings to land on Mars at some point in the 2030s. Aldrin sees his “terminal assignment” as persuading Nasa to have them stay there.
As the former Korean War fighter pilot said last week, the pilgrims on the Mayflower travelled to America to stay. “They didn’t wait around Plymouth Rock for the return trip.”
The UAE has not been immune to the appeal of travelling to the planet, with ambitious plans to launch its probe Hope to Mars in June 2020.
Compared with reaching Mars, getting to the Moon was a technical doddle. For a start, the Moon is a mere 384,000km away, a journey that took Apollo 11 four days. Mars and Earth, on the other hand, are between 54 million kilometres and 400 million kilometres apart, depending on their orbits around the Sun.
Nasa, with half a century of robot exploration of Mars under its belt, has been getting its ducks in a row, figuring out life-support systems capable of allowing extended stays on the planet’s surface.
“Engineers and scientists around the country,” it said “are working hard to develop the technologies astronauts will use to one day live and work on Mars – and safely return home from the next giant leap for humanity.”
Nasa has a fleet of robotic spacecraft and rovers on and around Mars, “dramatically increasing our knowledge about the Red Planet and paving the way for future human explorers”.
Among the rovers is Curiosity, which has been scouring the surface since 2012 for evidence of former microbial life forms. On August 19 it hit the news when it was paused to take a selfie.
At about the same time, the irrepressible Aldrin was in Florida, joking about being better known by kids today for his appearance on the comedy show Big Bang Theory, and Nasa was completing its first series of test firings of the engines that will power the space launch system and carry the first astronauts to Mars.
In December, the agency conducted the first flight test of the four-person Orion spacecraft that will eventually carry the first humans to Mars.
On Friday, that historic moment came a step closer when six Nasa volunteers began an experiment in close-quarter, isolated living – shut away for a year in a sealed dome designed to replicate the stresses, strains and technical demands of the nine-month journey to Mars.
The Red Planet will be in the news again next month when the film The Martian, starring Matt Damon, will be added to the vast canon of fictional work about the planet. This film is based on the bestselling book of the same name, a kind of space-age Robinson Crusoe and a technical tour de force that has impressed even space engineers with its attention to technical detail.
Damon plays an astronaut who, after an accident, is assumed to be dead and is left on Mars to fend for himself. Using only his technical know-how and the equipment his mission has left behind on the planet, including a handful of potatoes, he strives to survive in the hope that a rescue mission can be launched.
Barry Finger, chief engineer and director of life-support systems at Paragon Space Development in Houston and who has spent his career working within America’s space programme, says the book is strikingly accurate in its portrayal of the technology available for living and surviving on Mars.
“The author did a lot of good work to understand what is possible,” said Mr Finger. Paragon is carrying out feasibility studies for Mars One, a non-profit project based in the Netherlands, which is planning to establish a privately funded colony on Mars by 2027.
Getting to the Moon was an ego contest between two ideologies. Getting to Mars, says Andy Weir, author of The Martian, has a more pressing purpose.
“It is very important that we have a stable, self-sustaining human population somewhere other than Earth,” he says. “We have a very small, but non-zero, chance of being rendered extinct by some disaster on Earth – meteor strike, war, plague. These are all extinction level events that are very unlikely but which could happen.”
After 25 years as a software programmer, Weir says: “I know the value of backing up. If we extend the human population to another world, then the odds of our extinction drop to almost zero. That’s why we need to get out there.”
As the title of his book hints, when we do finally get out there, we may find ourselves facing an anticlimax.
In science, the search for signs of life on Mars has always been part of the bigger question, “Are we alone?”.
In fiction, ever since HG Wells’ 19th century novel The War of the Worlds, the Martians have been portrayed as monsters bent on the destruction of Earth and its inhabitants.
The reality is that, in a few generations, the Martians could be us, still alone and looking back at the tiny blue dot that is the Earth we have left behind.
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