THE LAST FEW PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' THAT WILL BE SHOWN HERE.

I am writing this two and a half years since we returned to Mars with the crew from the space station. It has certainly been a very eventful, challenging, and satisfying time here on Mars.

We all worked together as an extremely effective crew and soon developed a highly productive and well-organized working routine. So much so that some long and tedious jobs that needed to be done were polished off in a surprisingly short time.

No one in our crew worked harder (or could have worked harder) than Grizzly. He had the strength of an ox, as his stature would imply. If we had asked him to pull a plow across all the plots in the terrarium, I believe he could have and would have, but we didn’t of course. He and I were both toiling in the terrarium one day and Grizzly took his sweat-sodden shirt off and laid it on the lid of the composting structure to dry off. Then he continued working. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, but much hairier and not at all green, and he didn’t roar quite as much. I once jokingly said to Nick that if we wanted to move the Albatross across the taxiway to the other side of the hangar and couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of firing up the engines, we could ask Grizzly to pick it up and move it for us. Nick’s reply, after removing the expletives, was roughly,

“Good luck finding someone to bet against you!”

First, we concentrated on getting the terrarium filled with plants and animals, and I am very happy to report we had great success. Some of the seeds we’d brought with us failed to germinate, but the bulk of them didn’t fail, and with pollination, propagation, and determination, more than half of the terrarium is now filled with healthy fruit trees, other trees, shrubs, and vegetables. It looks, in short, like a jungle up there, but a relatively orderly one.

And so that's all folks. To find out what happens in the rest of the book you will have to buy a copy, which you can do by looking in Amazon for print and kindle copies or go to www.reachformars.com or click on the'buy the book'button top right of this column.