In February 1969, a few months before the first Apollo Moon landing, the incoming Nixon administration appointed a Space Task Group (STG), chaired by Vice President Agnew, to develop goals for the post-Apollo period. The STG was to report to the President in September. (President Nixon’s initiating memo was similar to that reproduced in the novel — but without the handwritten addendum…)

Post-Apollo planning for space entered its most crucial months. And gradually, over this period, NASA lost the case for Mars.

To space proponents in 1969, technical logic appeared to indicate a building from the achievements of Apollo to a progressive colonization of the Solar System, including missions to Mars. But the political logic differed.

The Apollo era — when the efforts of half a million Americans had been devoted to spaceflight — had been born out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, which were not repeated in 1969. Just a week after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first spaceflight in April 1961, President Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Johnson asking for options: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?…”

Although NASA by this time already had a schedule for a lunar program, there was no overriding logic favoring the Moon goal. In fact, in private, Kennedy berated his technical advisors for not producing recommendations for more tangible, down-to-earth scientific spectaculars, such as desalinating seawater.

So when Kennedy made his famous 1961 commitment to put a man on the Moon within a decade, the new program was not intended as a first step in an orderly expansion into space. Rather, Kennedy was reacting, to the early Soviet lead in spaceflight, and his administration’s Bay of Pigs disaster.

Thus, in 1969, there was no internal logic which proceeded from Apollo to Mars. This key point was evidently misunderstood by many within NASA in this period. Technically, Apollo was an end in itself, a system designed to place two men on the Moon for three days, and it achieved precisely that; its political goals were similarly well defined — to beat the Soviets in space — and had been achieved. With the completion of Apollo, there was no inertia to be carried forward to future goals — and, in 1969, no perceived threat to drive the necessary political reaction behind a new program.

Still, NASA had explored the technical feasibility of a Mars mission in as many as sixty study contracts between 1961 and 1968. But the visionaries were dealt a severe blow when the pictures of Mars returned by the early Mariners showed a bleak lunarlike cratered landscape. There were still compelling scientific reasons to go to Mars, but the opportunity for human expansion was clearly limited. NASA suffered deferments and cancellations as a result.