When I returned canada goose uk outlet after breakfast

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Mars changed my life.

Canada Goose Outlet This happened in the summer of 1965, eight years into what was being called the space age. The American spacecraft Mariner 4 had just flown by Mars and snapped the first fairly canadagoosesale up close photographs of the planet’s surface. It was a cheap canada goose uk rare first by the United States in its Cold War space race with the Soviet Union. The 21 grainy black and white photographs were a surprise and a disappointment. They showed a bleak landscape of Canada Goose Coats On Sale overlapping craters stretching across desolate plains, more like the moon painted red and nothing remotely like the scene of former civilizations of canal builders in science fiction and the minds of more imaginative astronomers.

Canada Goose sale Nevertheless, by noon on a Friday in July, Time’s top editors decided Mars deserved the magazine’s cover treatment. Our two correspondents at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., were asked buy canada goose jacket cheap to file more on the scientists and engineers and their interpretation of the photographs. How will this change thinking about Mars?

cheap Canada Goose I faced a long night writing an article more than three times the length originally planned. I promised the senior editor it would be on his desk when he arrived Saturday morning. There was no slack in this deadline. The magazine went to press Saturday night.

canada goose coats Finally, uk canada goose outlet a knock on the door brought the correspondents’ first file. Another knock, and I declined an invitation to Canada Goose sale go out for a drink. Turning from canada goose factory sale temptation and the window, I read the file and research notes uk canada goose from earlier in canada goose the week. I examined the photographs and pondered a drawing of canada goose store Mariner, the little spacecraft that had traveled millions of miles from home since its launching in late 1964.

Canada Goose Jackets Mars is 140 million miles from the sun, or half again as far as Earth is. The planet is about half Earth’s diameter, a cold desert with a reddish hue and the last of the rocky worlds this side of the gas giants in the outer solar system. Its mystique made it a prime destination of space age investigation. I don’t recall ever feeling panic or despair. I didn’t dare, I suppose. I ducked out for a container of black coffee. Restaurants were closed, the bars thinning out. The nearest deli was down to one counterman yawning over the sports pages. Radio City Music Hall’s marquee was dark. The city that never sleeps was nodding off.

buy canada goose jacket cheap During this break, I came to a life changing self discovery. From an early age, I had seemed hard wired for a career in journalism but had set my sights on political reporting. canada goose black friday sale (Move over, Walter Lippmann and James Reston.) But now I was writing the kind of story I found endlessly fascinating and satisfying the 20th century version of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Just as Mariner 4 had fired its thrusters to make midcourse corrections to its Mars bound trajectory, I was ready for a midcourse correction buy canada goose jacket in my career. I would be a science and space journalist.

canadian goose jacket At dawn, I collapsed on the couch in the senior editor’s office for a couple of hours of restless canada goose clearance sale sleep. I kept waking up to scribble a note to myself or record a canada goose coats on sale turn canadian goose jacket of phrase. When the editor, Richard Seamon, arrived, he gave me a wan, questioning smile. It was a patchwork of inserts and emendations that looked messy but, I believed, added up to a narrative worthy of the first successful flight to Canada Goose Outlet Mars. Dick’s quick reading assuaged canada goose uk black friday his worst concerns. He sent the script to the typing pool to make a clean copy. When I returned canada goose uk outlet after breakfast, Dick flashed the thumbs up sign. And sure enough, canada goose clearance by Monday, millions of copies of my cover story were on newsstands around the world.

A month later, I wrote another cover on Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the NASA chief flight director, and the new mission control center at Houston cheap Canada Goose and while Time seldom used bylines in those days, I was featured in that issue’s Publisher’s Letter. That proved to be an advertisement for myself.

canada goose clearance sale “We’re looking for someone to concentrate on the lunar program,” Salisbury said. “We want someone to write about Apollo not as a science and https://www.canadagoosesale.biz technology undertaking but as a great human adventure, one of the biggest stories of the century.”

canada goose black friday sale That hooked me. I agreed to meet with him and other Times editors. They told me that for various reasons they did not divulge, the paper was still looking for a reporter to entrust with the story of this magnitude. I liked what I heard.

canada goose deals As you were, Lippmann and Reston.

canada goose clearance I joined The Times in November 1965, one day before the lights went Canada Goose Online out all over New York and much of the Northeast. It was a jolting greeting for the new reporter, who plunged into investigating the causes of the blackout before setting out for the moon, and more encounters with Mars.

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Canada Goose online Later Mariner missions would reveal that the first Mars flyby had left a misleading impression, a reminder to scientists of the fable of the blind men examining an elephant part by part, unable to conceive of the whole. The first spacecraft had looked at 1 percent of the planet. The Mars orbiter Mariner 9 photographed and mapped the entire planet, exposing its amplitude of towering volcanoes, a rift system that dwarfs the Grand Canyon, and dry channels carved out by water in the past.

Canada Goose Parka In 1976, two Viking landers touched down on widely separated plains of Mars, and two Viking orbiters extended photography of Canada Goose online the surface at higher resolutions. More recently, mobile rovers have carried explorations beyond landing sites, over horizons and into distant hills.

buy canada goose jacket The moonwalks of Apollo may have been my biggest stories, but it was the mystique of Mars that changed my career plan in midcourse. Someday, people will find their way to the now well mapped Mars surface. Others will no doubt jump at the chance to enshrine that Canada Goose Jackets arrival for the cover of Time and the canada goose coats front page of The New York Times.

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