Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome, powerful shuttles and unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle...
Twenty days later, the blue-white earth has shrunk to a bright dot of light against the background of stars in the eternal night of outer space. Looking back, the crew members are filled with a sense of isolation, a feeling that will never quite leave them during the 280-day outbound leg of their journey. A busy schedule provides some distraction. The space travelers perform scientific experiments, practice taking shelter against solar-flare radiation, tend vegetables in their hydroponic greenhouses, exercise vigorously for several hours each day and tap into digital libraries for music, light reading matter and courses...
...first they are able to communicate easily with controllers on earth. But as they head farther into space, the time required for their radio signals to reach earth lengthens to minutes, and the ever widening gap between questions and answers makes conversation difficult. Now, with the earth more than 100 million miles away, Mars is looming in the spacecraft portholes, and the crew begins preparing for a yearlong adventure on another world...
...might guess that his dogs, if he had any, would be named Bromide and Quinine, that he would marry a brilliant and cranky actress and that he would make his last journey on earth in a load of shellfish. But it is not this magic element of predictability in a writer's destiny that concerns us but the stamina and courage he brings in an effort to vary this magic...
...heart that looks to a "society that will be more integrated and fair, where character will be the most important thing, where hearts don't require visas." He says his record wasn't an attempted crossover, but "more like a 'meet halfway.' People can relate to any music on earth provided they have a shot at listening...