And that frontier remains full of hazards. Historically less than half of all missions flown from Earth to Mars have been successful, with the most recent failures for the United States coming in 1999. Then Mars Polar Lander went silent after beginning its final landing sequence. The humiliating fiasco prompted an overhaul of NASA's Mars exploration program and included the addition of independent reviews and pre-flight tests, raising the price tag of Mars Odyssey by several million dollars and risking support for future Martian flights. We're going across a hundred million miles of space.
Bad things can happen.
We've done the kind of testing, we've done the kind of checking that we know how to do. We're on the verge of being able to say that perhaps life on Earth was not a cosmic fluke, but it was part of a broader cosmic imperative. Meanwhile, there was plenty of life evident around the Florida launch site Saturday as perfect weather and a high-profile launch combined to entice thousands of residents and tourists to jam the roads around the space center for an up close view of the Boeing Delta 2 rocket lifting off. No one was disappointed. Right on time the 13-story rocket rode its column of smoke and fire to the northeast, marking its path across sunny, crystal clear skies.