#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.

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