d begun, five years ago, as Project Jupiter the first manned round trip to the greatest of the planets (Clarke 85). According to the book, this mission had been started two years ago from present day. The current space program cannot accomplish a mission of this calabur. However, many modern day scientists know Interstellar travel is real and possible (Mallove 1). Keeping this in mind, scientists have an incentive to keep advancing everyday. The current day space program is advancing one step at a time. So far, In exploring the planets, it has been robotic technology (Lewis 160). A manned flight to a distant planet was and still is a dream to modern day scientists. However, Clarke was able to recreate this dream and make space travel become an easy everyday process. The space program in the book is so advanced that it is portrayed as a much more lax operation than present day. Today, the space program can only send a carefully selected group of elites to travel into space. The modern day program . . . Demanded the selection of new types of astronauts. Pilots would still be needed to control the Space Shuttle, but different skills would be required to perform space walks, operate the Shuttles robot arm and deploy satellites (Davies 146). Since missions are so expensive, they need to be fully accomplished thus requiring the best astronauts anyone can find. Furthermore, the missions found in the book were considered routine. Contrastingly, present day standards would describe them as explicit and gone about in a more careful manner. An ordinary civilian in the book . . . Had been to Mars once, to the Moon three times, and to the various space stations more often than he could remember (Clarke 35). The civilian had not been through the process of training or selection as is required today. Since Clarke portrayed spaceflight as an easy operation, small missions had seemed to become unimportant. When about to take ...
