This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel with the space historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Matthew Shindell.

His new book is for the love of Mars, the human history of the red planet.

The robots, the programs wave after wave of conquest, probing Mars, first a fly-by with Mariner,

then orbiter, then landers, now rovers, and of course ingenuity,

the brave little toaster that flies on the surface of Mars.

This comes out of the Cold War, and Matt, you make an ironic point that the Cold War came to a moment

where the U.S. had successfully defeated the Soviets in the race to the moon and a presentation

was made by NASA to then Nixon administration to reproduce the Apollo program on Mars. What happened, Matt? Yeah, so, you know,

there was this moment within NASA where the success of the Apollo program, to many, was sort of

an indication that, you know, NASA was so good at what it did that it should continue to basically push

the envelope, to continue with the same level of funding and, you know, continue the U.S.

leadership in space by moving from from the moon to Mars with a similar program.

But, you know, the politics at home were not really suitable for that, right?

Like the U.S. public had, you know, enjoyed the Apollo program,

but had not always been happy with the amount of money that it actually took to get humans to the moon. And Nixon, who was president

at the time, you know, he felt the political winds changing. He felt that it was important to

shift focus to more domestic issues like poverty, like civil rights, other issues that were becoming important to the American

people or had been already important. But with Apollo having been a success, it was time

he felt to kind of pull back and make space exploration have to compete with other national

priorities.

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