They had a dream. It was an interplanetary dream that was to have been fulfilled four years from today, on December 17th, 2003, when for the first time an aeroplane would fly on Mars. It was a dream that would have echoed a similar event on Earth that had taken place 100 years before at Kitty Hawk, Carolina.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were makers of bicycles from Dayton. They progressed to try their hands at aeroplanes, and on December 17th, 1903, the chain-driven Flyer I, piloted by the 32-year old Orville, remained airborne over a distance of 120 feet on a beach near the ominously named Kill Devil Hill.
The day and place had been chosen very carefully. Having performed a great many experiments in a home-made windtunnel, the brothers were aware of the critical importance of a strong but steady breeze. On that morning a strong anti-cyclone dominated the Midwest of the United States, and the north-easterly airflow along its eastern flank provided the steady wind required for the experiment.
Four short but successful flights were completed before the weather rather unsportingly intervened to spoil the fun in the guise of a gust of wind to overturn the aircraft. The damage was minor, but it was sufficient to bring to an end the activities of that eventful day. They had a dream.
The Mars Airplane would have been the perfect celebration of that great achievement. It would have been un-Orvilled and unmanned, of course, but as an experiment to find out more about the planet it would have overcome a serious limitation of the "surface rovers", that they can travel only 100 yards or so from where they land.
The Mars Airplane was to be sent to Mars aboard a spacecraft which, as it entered the Martian atmosphere, would release a canister from which the folded plane would then emerge.
As its wings, 20 feet apiece, unfurled, and its hydrazine-powered propellor engine sprang to life, the aircraft would begin to fly at low altitude above the planet's surface on a mission lasting several days; it would take a million photographs, and scan thousands of square miles with a spectrometer to tell us more about the chemical composition of our nearest neighbour. They had a dream.
But the failure of Mars Climate Orbiter and Planet Lander have given pause. The native hue of resolution has been sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought. Or to put it another way, as the American jazz poet Langston Hughes so nicely did: Good morning, daddy.
Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred?