There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this strategy. With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the exploration of space could take a very different course.

In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine imaginative scenario of unmanned spaceflight.

"Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke speculated. "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close quarters. A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a narrow radio beam. It is unlikely that true television will be possible, with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges. The best that could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes."

This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to true prescience. It's astonishingly close to the true-life facts of the early Mars probes. Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in 1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that "tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" -- as well as that of "true television." In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and electronic media are exploding exponentially.

Advances in computers and communications now make it possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along entirely novel lines. Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. However, there is no "Martian colony." There are no three-stage