Armchair Travel: Life on Mars

I saw up straight in my chair at the breakfast table when I read in today's newspaper that President Obama predicts we'll arrive on Mars within his lifetime. But my dreams of being a Mars astronaut long ago came crashing to earth.
In the 1950's I read Robert Heinlein's Red Planet, a story about kids attending a boarding school on Mars. I watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol on TV. Forbidden Planet remains one of my all-time favorite movies.

Two weeks before my eleventh birthday I gazed up at Sputnik winking its way across the heavens in the dark October skies over Seattle. I formed the "RK Rocket Club" with my junior high school classmate, Karl. We stuffed the bottoms of ballpoint pens with paper matches as solid fuel propellant, lit them afire, and then tracked our little rockets as they briefly arced from "lift off" to crash-landing moments later.

When I was in high school JFK promised to beat the Russians in the space-race to the Moon. I had no doubt that early in my lifetime I would set foot on Heinlein's Red Planet, shake hands with Martians, and cruise aboard boats on its many canals.

I've read about space travel for nearly six decades, seen most of the Star Trek television episodes and films, and watched Neil Armstrong make the first footsteps on the Moon. But like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, I seem destined to dream about space flight, but never to escape the pull of gravity and touch down on extraterrestrial soil.

In 1962 when I was fifteen, NASA astronaut John Glenn took his first ride "off planet." At age 77, he made his final trip toward the stars in the Space Shuttle Discovery, proving that just because you're a geezer doesn't mean you don't have the will and capacity to be a space traveler.

President Obama thinks Americans will set foot on Mars twenty to thirty years from now when I would be in my eighties or nineties. If I can get Doctor Leonard McCoy to perform a total-body transplant I'll be ready to rocket beyond my dreams and onto the real world of Mars.