TOUCHED DOWN ON MARS: 3:55 p.m.(E.S.T.) - 18/2/ 2021.

THE LATEST ROVER, NAMED 'PERSEVERANCE', HAS JUST LANDED IN THE JEZERO CRATER ON THE PLANET MARS.

THIS IS THE SORT OF THING IT WILL BE DOING OVER THE NEXT MARTIAN YEAR, WHICH IS 687  EARTH DAYS

AND THIS IS WHAT THE MARTIANS WILL FIND WHEN THEY CAPTURE IT AND OPEN IT UP 

ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM 'REACH FOR MARS.'

Prologue

We could hear the rumble of high-powered rocket engines warming up at idle from the other side of the airfield as we climbed aboard the transport. That rumble grew steadily louder as we were carried across the airfield toward the hangar, until I could feel the vibrations of it in my chest. As we climbed down from the Hummer and approached the external crew access door, the engines shut down one by one so that when we entered and walked down the corridor to the main hangar, our footsteps and their echoes off the walls were the only sounds that filled an eerie silence. As we entered the main hangar, we all stopped in our tracks and gazed up at the spaceship resting on her launch ramp above us.

With the brilliance of the overhead hangar arc lights reflecting off her white paint and her nose canted up thirty degrees, she looked as if she was flying to the stars without us. She was breathtakingly beautiful. She was to be our home for roughly two years—one hundred and eighty days of flight time to Mars, three hundred and seventy days of living and working there, and one hundred and eighty days for the return journey, or thereabouts. She was named Albatross after the fabled bird, a legendary symbol of hope and good luck to ancient (and not-so-ancient) mariners.

She would have had a classic flying saucer shape if it weren’t for the array of three huge thrusters poking out of her stern. There was one port thruster and one starboard thruster, and nestled between them but slightly higher on the stern was the main thruster. There were also twin Titan rocket boosters mounted to her underbelly, which gave the impression that she was carrying two very large torpedoes. They were there to save us fuel and to help blast us up to exit speed into the stratosphere, where they would be released to parachute back to Earth to be recovered, serviced, and refueled ready for the next launch. The spell was broken by the approach of Colonel Holman McCallum. He looked over his shoulder and upward, saying,

“She certainly is a beautiful ship to behold. I have no doubt that you two clowns are dying to launch her into space and send her blazing through the solar system toward Mars.”

“Yes, sir!” Nick and I replied immediately. He shook our hands and then the hands of the rest of the crew, wishing us all the best of luck. Then he escorted us to the elevator that would lift us to the entry hatch into the ship.

The other four crew members stepped onto the elevator, and it started to rise. Holly, as the colonel was known, grabbed our arms and led us into a room nearby. After closing the door, he turned and walked to his briefcase, opened it, and pulled out two astronaut canteens, which he held out to us. Although they looked like normal canteens, they were designed to be used in zero gravity, so they had a one way valve stem to draw out the liquid. More like a Sippy cup than a canteen, really.

“We’ve already got one each, sir,” I said.

“Not like these, you haven’t. They’re filled with rum.” We took them eagerly and thanked him.

“Think of it as a going away gift, and I stress going away,” he said with a smile. “I figure you won’t come across many corner liquor stores out there, although I suppose you could order it on the Internet, but you’d have Buckley’s chance of getting it delivered to you! Drink it slowly; it’s got to last you twenty-four months or more.”

We thanked him again as we stepped onto the elevator, and it started to rise. Holly once again shook our hands and wished us good luck on the gantry outside the entry hatch. He couldn’t follow us into the ship, because he wasn’t wearing magnetic boots, which were required to keep from sliding down the thirty-degree slope of the metal deck and crashing into the aft bulkhead. After we were fully suited up and strapped into our launch chairs, there wasn’t really anything for us to do while the techies did the final checks and preparations to launch, so I let my mind wander back to the time when I had first met Nicholas Watson.

ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM 'REACH FOR MARS!'

Introduction
Science or Fiction
Ever since humans dropped out of the trees and started walking around on two legs,
they have always looked up at night and gazed at the stars in wonder. Sitting at their
fires outside their caves, as large creatures blundered around them in the dark, or eons
later sitting at their campfires after riding the range all day herding and driving large
creatures, who blundered around him in the dark, they would look up and gaze at the
stars in wonder.
They saw groups of stars that they thought made shapes and gave them names. They
saw planets among the stars and gave them names. They used them to explain
previously unexplainable events on planet Earth. They used them to navigate their way
around our planet, and they even used them to predict our future (for better or worse).
They invented telescopes so they could look at them more closely, which they made
larger and larger so they could look at them even more closely. Today they fire
telescopes into space so they can look at them really closely.
As humanity progressed, a new breed of humans evolved: men and women who
dreamed of flying to the stars and wrote stories about their dreams, which we call
science fiction—Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and the list goes
on.
Their stories have enthralled and inspired generations of young children and teenagers
to dream of flying to the stars themselves. Some grew up to follow that dream and
became scientists specializing in astrophysics and rocket propulsion technology to try to
make that dream come true.
The writers posed the question, “What if we could?”
The scientists developed the technology, So we could!
All of the technology described in this novel to fly my astronauts to Mars, keep them
alive while they’re there, and fly them back home again exists and is well known to
NASA scientists. Most of it has been tested and proven, and the rest is in the process of
being proven by NASA scientists, the Mars Society, and the National Space Society,
among others.
If the major governments of the world cut back on the funds they pour into developing
weapons of mass destruction and used those funds to explore and terraform Mars into
a livable environment for man, surely that would be a better future for mankind.


P.S. I have flown to a planet among those stars, and I never came back!- Drew Hunt.A.D. 2018.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL- REACH FOR MARS.

WE WILL NOT BLAST-OFF QUIETLY INTO THE COLD DARKNESS OF SPACE AND WIND UP DEAD.
WE WILL FIGHT ON TO BUILD A PLANET TO LIVE AND THRIVE UPON INSTEAD!
                     
                                                                                                    DREW HUNT. A.D. 2015.

Confession!

Ok! I am not actually going to Mars physically,( sorry to my critics), but my name is. That's right, I am putting my name on Mars. NASA is sending a new Mars Rover to Mars next year and is offering to anybody who's interested to send their names on board. Honestly, how could I possibly resist that?!

Anyway, in other aeronautical news, ( not actually to do with space travel as it is extremely unlikely that you would encounter flying chickens in Space, but the story amused me so I would like to share it with you), I read a post from author Brian Morgan the other day.

It seems that the technicians at Rolls-Royce have invented a chicken gun, which fires dead chickens at aircraft windshields and jet engine intakes,( no, not their cars), in order to simulate high-velocity bird strikes. Technicians in America, on hearing about this, contacted Rolls-Royce and asked them if they could send them one so they could fire chickens at the windscreens of their new high-speed trains.

Once the gun arrived and was set up they gleefully prepared for the first test. Their grins quickly turned to expressions of horror as the first chicken they fired shattered the shatterproof windscreen, tore through the control console, smashed the Engineer's chair backrest into two halves, then lodged itself halfway through the back wall of the Engineer's cabin.

Suspending any further experiments, the shocked and horrified Technicians immediately sent the notes and video of the disastrous experiment to the Technicians at Rolls-Royce and asked them to provide them with possible solutions to the problem. After reviewing the American's notes and video, the Rolls-Royce technicians replied with a simple one-sentence e-mail.

                                   "DE-FROST THE CHICKEN BEFORE FIRING IT!

I'M LEAVING, ON A ROCKET PLANE!

I am about to do the very thing that I wrote about a few years ago. I am about to reach for Mars!
I have a one-way ticket to the Red Planet (something I am sure my critics will be happy to hear)!
Check out my boarding pass below, especially the miles or kilometres and imagine how many Frequent Flyer mileage points I will get, I'll be rich but I will have nowhere to spend it up there!

A TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXCERPT FROM ' WE ARE MARTIAN.'

So after much cajoling and begging Gorad finally agreed to let me try on a Para-suit and take it for a spin. After I had climbed into the suit, had been briefed on how to use it and the helmet had been attached and sealed I was escorted through the airlock onto the Martian surface. I stood there and looked around for places to fly to and spotted a tall mountain in the distance. I decided that I wanted to do the Superman thing and leap that tall mountain in a single bound so I launched myself off the ground. Unfortunately, I totally missed the tall mountain and continued upwards into the Martian skies, rapidly heading towards Outer Space and beyond.

“Hey Gorad, I seem to have missed the tall mountain I was aiming for and it now appears that I will be landing on Phobos, or crashing into it, shortly! So, my question to you is this;

HOW DO I TURN THIS FUCKING THING AROUND!?,

Over,”

To my great embarrassment and chagrin I could hear the laughter in his voice and in the background when he answered,

“Hello there, Drew, it’s really quite simple. Look down, find a part of the landscape to land on and stare at it while thinking how much you would really like to be standing on it right now.”

I followed his instructions, stared down at a flat piece of ground to my left and the Para-suit turned quickly and flew me towards it.

Back in my fighter pilot days there was a time when the backroom boffins were working to develop sight-guided missiles which the pilot could guide in to strike simply by staring at the target. I don’t know whether they ever produced any, I certainly was never trained to use them and never carried any but I could see potential problems with their use. The primary problem to my mind was simply this:

Once the missile had been launched and was tracking towards the target, guided by the pilot’s sight, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly developed an itch that he just had to scratch in his groin or thereabouts and without thinking looked down to scratch it,.....OUCH!

The Para-suit started acting in a similar fashion. Something caught my eye far to the right of my selected L.Z. and the Para-suit veered and flew me towards that when I glanced at it. Something else caught my eye off in a different direction and the Para-suit veered once more. To an observer on the ground, (and unfortunately there were quite a few), I must have looked like a crazed human shaped Pinball ricocheting and rebounding in all directions around the Martian skies until I was finally able to lock on to a target and keep all my concentration centred on making it my LZ, which just happened to be the plain near the city where all the observers were observing me with great amusement. So it was with some satisfaction that I watched them scattering in all directions like startled cattle as I swooped down from the skies towards them.

Just before I touched down I realized that I was still travelling with considerable forward momentum and started pumping my legs as fast as I could so I literally hit the ground running. The second that I was on the ground I pushed one of the buttons on the left wristband of the suit to turn it off so it couldn’t launch me into the skies once more. This panic-inspired decision was quickly proved to be ill-advised as my forward motion was too fast for my legs to keep up with, and although the suit was no longer propelling me forward it was also no longer supporting me in an upright position which caused me to pitch forward off my rapidly, (but unfortunately not rapidly enough), pumping feet. I landed on my left shoulder and rolled, which then became an ‘arse-over-tit’ tumble across the sandy Martian landscape before I finally came to rest upside down and semi-embedded in a large pile of Martian dust and sand.

I lay there for a while trying to collect my thoughts until I realized that I didn’t have any as they had all been rattled out of my head during my arse-over-titting across the Martian landscape. So instead I started pondering why these sorts of things so often seemed to happen to me,(and only me!), until I was interrupted by the appearance of an upside-down Nick in my visor, bending over me with his hands on his knees, probably to support himself while he laughed his helmet off.

“So did you enjoy your little escapade, didja?” He asked breathlessly between bouts of chuckling,

“Sometimes I get a nasty feeling that I’m all of the three stooges crammed together into one!” I answered,

“You’re definitely an Act!” Nick chuckled as he reached down with his right hand to help me up, “You’ve no Class, but you are definitely an Act!”

He then made an exaggerated pantomime of brushing dust and sand off me when I was standing upright. I looked down at the perfect imprint of me in the pile of Martian dust and kicked it, thus erasing the imprint as the dust collapsed into it.

I was not in the least unnerved, startled or scared by my little escapade, yet it was to be a very long time before I climbed into a Para-suit again.