As I adjusted my straps, I had the same feeling I'd had the first time I orbited. I was half afraid and half eager. At the time I took my first solo, I'd asked a ground crewman: "What'll I do if something goes wrong?" And he replied: "Just sit there. You won't have time to do anything else."
We'd land on Mars, all right. Chances were good that we'd land alive. Leaving Mars alive would be a different matter. I found myself thinking: If the Martians don't get me, Dr. Spartan will.
Spartan touched a switch. A green light flashed on in the control room. Everything was ready for the entry into Mars atmosphere. The light blinked once. The electronic controls were working. At the proper moment the rockets would slow us down and Mars' gravity would do the rest.
Then the whole ship shook. Our rockets were blasting. I felt pressure in the seat of my spacesuit. After living for eighteen months with gravity so lean that a man could hardly fall down, I had G's in my pants. I felt as if I'd returned to earth again. I was no longer afraid. We were on our way down to Mars.
The deceleration began to push up the gravity inside the capsule. But it was nothing like the force a man felt when re-entering the earth's atmosphere. Mars is only one tenth the mass of the earth and its gravity is something like forty per cent. We were falling in slow motion, and carefully calculated rocket bursts, all handled by automatic controls, would set us down more gently than a parachute. In fact, a parachute on Mars would only be slightly more effective than on the moon. Mars has some atmosphere, though very thin, while the moon has none at all.
The scenery was beautiful. Perhaps the colors were not as blatant as those seen approaching the earth. There were no deep blues of the sea, greens of the fields and forests, yellow of deserts and the snow-tipped majesty of great mountain ranges. The Martian polar caps were not the same as ours either, for they were almost perfect circles. The ice which caps the terrestrial poles is irregular because of continents and seas.
But Mars was spectacular. Nearly everything had a tint of red. Even the areas the early astronomers called seas, because they had a greenish shade, showed a brownish red base. The mountains, which soon became visible as we approached the planet, were massive but eroded, far less impressive than the Rockies, the Alps, the Andes or Himalayas. We saw nothing that looked like bodies of water.
As we approached the planet, our orbital momentum carried us forward more rapidly than the planet revolved on its axis. Mare Erithraeum swung beneath us and extending eastward was a broad double-canal called Nectar, flowing through a wide expanse of reddish desert.
Then I sensed a trembling in the capsule and I knew we had hit the top of the Martian atmosphere. I could not see anything directly beneath us now, because the capsule base cut off the view, but turning my head I saw the brownish green of the Martian pampas far to the north, desert to the south, Mare Erithraeum to the west, and then two smaller, oval patches of vegetation to the east.
The latter were Solis Lacus Minor and Solis Lacus Major, between which two areas we planned to land.