Brought over from the old site - 8/3//06

In the 1960's & early 70's, NASA sent a series of missions to Mars (and Venus) under the Mariner program. Of the probes headed to Mars, Mariner 3 failed on launch, Mariner 4, 6 and 7 turned up craters. No Marianas Trench, no Olympus Mons, nothing...except a surface that looked like our moon. Then Mariner 8 had a second stage failure that ended the mission before it could ever reach Mars.

NASA just kept launching and looking. Then, Mariner 9 hit the jackpot. The valleys, the volcanoes what looked like ancient rivers....it was all there. Mariner 9 *is* the reason that kids, today, think they want to go to Mars.

Now think about our own times. If we had found nothing on 3 previous missions and had two failures, to boot, do you think that Congress would give NASA more funding to go on what is, to a casual observer, a wild goose chase? Would you be supportive of continued exploration in the face of these facts? What wonders still lie undiscovered simply because we gave up looking for them, too soon?