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6 milestones, in chronological order.
- 23 May 1576The Telescope Era
Tycho Brahe builds Uraniborg and measures Mars by eye
Tycho fixed Mars to about an arcminute with sighting instruments alone, cross-checking with duplicate observers and correcting for refraction — and the logbooks went to Kepler.
- 1894Canals and Dreamers
Lowell builds an observatory to prove Mars is alive
A wealthy Bostonian put a telescope on a 7,200-foot ridge in Arizona to map a Martian irrigation network. The work was meticulous and entirely wrong.
- 1908Canals and Dreamers
Bogdanov puts a communist utopia on Mars
Lenin's rival inside the Bolshevik party wrote a Mars that is already communist, running out of raw material, and debating whether to take Earth and remove the humans.
- Written 1949, published 1952Canals and Dreamers
Von Braun costs out a Mars expedition
Ten ships, seventy crew, and 950 launches to assemble the fleet in Earth orbit: the first Mars expedition worked out in real numbers, and never flown.
- 7 March 1970First Contact
Nixon says no to Mars
Von Braun had twelve astronauts leaving Earth orbit on 12 November 1981 aboard two nuclear ships. Seven months later Nixon put Mars behind a rigorous system of national priorities.
- 3 June 2010 – 4 November 2011The Rover Decades
Six men spend 520 days sealed in a Moscow mock-up
Mars-500 ran a Mars mission at full length with nobody leaving the building. Four of the six crew came out with a sleep or behavioural disorder.