#CountdowntoMars #Mars @search_mars @howellspace @Thievesbook

I always knew I wanted to write books from an early age, and given my interests, it was obvious I should write about something I loved. Take a guess what that was. Just take a guess.
@search_mars @howellspace @Thievesbook So yes, the first book I ever worked on was about Mars - and the reason? Because the Soviet Union was launching two missions in the summer of 1988 to orbit and make landings on Phobos, the larger Martian moon
It also looked forward to how people would land on Mars, hence the title. Several people buttonholed me to say there was not going to be another space race. I pointed out it referred to humans going there.
Memo from older writer to younger ones: nobody likes a smart ass.
The Phobos landings should have been the great space spectacular of 1989: but they weren’t. The USSR never had much luck with the Red Planet, a lot of the failures hidden behind the Iron Curtain. Or as I later wrote, "Red Faces for Red Scientists at Red Planet."
Glasnost – the opening up of Soviet society - was such that the week of the Phobos 1 launch in July 1988 Professor Roald Sagdeev was in Britain - I met him and interviewed him over afternoon tea at Trinity College (as you do)
Sagdeev was unusual as he was friendly, unassuming and approachable: he was also a Tatar by birth, he was a nuclear physicist and in 1973, took over the Institute for Space Research (IKI) as director
It was thanks to him, that openness started in the robotic side of the Soviet space programme. It started with the VeGa missions to Venus – which dropped French-built balloons into its atmosphere – and then on to Halley in March 1986
There is no H in the Cyrillic alphabet, so the nearest transliteration is “Gallei” – Галлей - and both Vega probes arrived at the comet in March 1986
There is also a story – doubted in some circles – that Edmond Halley himself pushed Peter The Great around a garden in a wheelbarrow in Greenwich after they got spectacularly rat-arsed. I mean we’ve all done that - here's me as a student but not with a Russian monarch ...,
The Halley’s comet encounters by the VeGa spacecraft occurred at the same time as Gorbachev’s first chairing of the Politburo. He jokingly asked Sagdeev - “Why did you arrange this to coincide with the 27th Congress?” or words to that affect
Sagdeev was an adviser to Gorbachev on how to deal with the U.S. “SDI” or “Star Wars” defence shield which the USSR realised they couldn’t compete with - it's worth reading his autobiography for that alone
The full astonishing story of the Soviet space program has now been told by the very meticulous and superb writer @historyasif and Lou Friedman – for whom I worked and also made tea in 1982 – has written a splendid book about what happened as the Iron Curtain fell
My own memory is of having difficulty even when you could telephone IKI in 1989/1990. You would ring, talk to the director's secretary who would deny you had spoken the day before or had left a message - so you would do the same, and ring the next day......
The story I was later told was that there were three part time secretaries all called Natasha (I think) -- so when Natasha said hello and denied you had spoken to her, she wasn't wrong. But it always seemed emblematic of that time period.....
I also did get to Baikonur in 1994 which was one of the most surreal experiences I have ever had - they hadn't pulled down the statue of Lenin in (here's a clue) Leninsk - did they not get the memo that the USSR didn't exist an more? And why is Lenin always hailing a taxi?
Where else would you have to stop to let a dromedary cross the road

(It might be a camel, but don't @ me as my expertise doesn't extend to that world)
You could walk all over the launchpad while the Semyorka ("Good ol' Number Seven) -- or R7 as it was known at one point - was being hoisted. And there was a building full of nosecones.......
The Soviet Shuttle Buran had flown once in 1988 - and in one building there was a mock up which looked all the world like hordes of Dickensian waifs had been in and pinched the wheels
But what stuck in my mind was the "baboushka" selling fizzy drinks next to where the cosmonauts suited up - she actually had an abacus which I thought was just wonderful. And that concludes this thread on what I did on a press jaunt to Baikonur

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More from @People_Of_Space

17 Feb
So another thread on..... Mars, this time the early years of the space age

#CountdowntoMars #Mars #Perseverance ImageImageImageImage
1964 was a vintage year. The Beatles, Goldfinger, (consults notes – I was very young at the time), my christening and..... oh yes, JPL sent the first missions to the Red Planet @carolynporco ImageImageImageImage
What people forget is that even then so very little was known about the Red Planet as it was not easy to see with then state-of-the art equipment – in that same year of 1964 the official USAF Cartography Center map of Mars still had canals drawn on it as ridiculous as it seems ImageImage
Read 10 tweets
17 Feb
Good morning, and wonder ..... are you ready for some prime Mars related-content? And, indeed .... life on the Red Planet choice cuts? #Mars #LifeonMars #countdowntoMars ImageImageImageImage
As we head towards tomorrow’s excitement in Jezero Crater, time for the very question of eternity: are we alone? And so I will tweet a thread on how our view of life on the Red Planet has changed over the years...... ImageImageImageImage
Where did the notion that life might exist on Mars come from? One of the first mentions is from the telescopic era when the polar ice caps were discovered and by the person who actually discovered them Image
Read 15 tweets
16 Feb
I just saw my old comrade-in-the-science-writing trenches Marcus had tweeted this It is a source of great pleasure to me that my old contemporaries like him, @sciencenelson, @drdwhitehouse and @drstuclark are doing so well!
I started the day talking about books and so will say a few more words here. I don't read that many space or science books any more, mainly because I don't have to for work any more. But here are some authors who I think are brilliantly good
One of the reasons I was delighted to collaborate with @howellspace is because she is to my mind the most productive space writer working today - since we finished Mars she has published two more books with another on the go and another on the cards after that
Read 10 tweets
16 Feb
So my final thread this evening..... I reminisced early about the tail end of the Soviet days, when you only ever heard the good news after it had happened. Remind you of anywhere else?
China’s space program today is the same; trying to work out what is happening is a full time journalistic detective story. For that, take a look at @aj_fi who knows everything about China's space program - and the Tianwen mission now in orbit
So the Tianwen orbiter has arrived in orbit around Mars and here is what we know - and what we can reasonably expect over the next few months.....
Read 11 tweets
16 Feb
As people seem to have enjoyed my reminiscences of Baikonur, here is an even more surreal story - and one that had me laughing so hard I thought I would have a nosebleed. It involves the Famous British Scientist Who Wok Up One Day To Read His Own Obituary
Professor Heinz Wolff was known to a generation of kids as the host of "The Great Egg Race" - where people built ever so slightly bizarre gadgets bbc.co.uk/archive/the-gr…
Anyone seeing this will think it is beyond parody - except, that whole time period of slightly earnest "educational TV" on the BBC was parodied in the utterly wonderful "Look Around You" - probably my favourite comedy of recent years
vimeo.com/38683125
Read 14 tweets
16 Feb
So in the early part of my career, I wrote a few books about space and science. In the nineties, I started work on the Mars book, but like all great works of art (ahem), I abandoned it. @howellspace took pity on me and the rest is history or her story, in truth.
I was also a fairly unconvincing Harry Potter impersonator

(This was three years before Harry was even published btw)
After that, I turned to crime (writing) - but realised that, at heart, the best way to tell science stories is as detective stories with the investigators as the lead characters. If you tell the story through their eyes, people with no technical background can understand
Read 19 tweets

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