Filmmakers work on virtual Mars mission

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A month of Mars
In Canada, the stand-alone "Mars Rising" documentary — which covers the challenges of an actual Mars flight — will air prior to the miniseries itself.

“It will kind of be like a month of Mars,” Jodi Bloom, manager of programming communications for the Discovery Channel, told Space.com.

In the United States, the documentary is slated to appear on The Science Channel, though plans for the miniseries are still developing, Lewis said.

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"Race to Mars" stems from the pens of veteran science fiction writing team of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Canada’s Galafilm, Inc. production house.

“Just as Capt. Rick Erwin assembled the ‘best of the best’ for his pioneering mission to Mars, so too have gathered the most comprehensive research, technologically accurate effects, strongest cast and most compelling writing team for this intensive 'Race to Mars' production,” Phyllis Platt, the film’s executive producer at Galafilm, said in a statement.

Mars stories on the rise
Documentary-style depictions of human space exploration seem to be on the rise. The BBC's "Space Race" — a fact-based version of the U.S.-Soviet moonshot rivalry — is set to debut in the United States' on the National Geographic Channel next month. That follows the British-made "Space Odyssey" (also known as "Voyage to the Planets and Beyond"), which chronicles the missions of an international group of astronauts as they explore Venus, Mars and the outer planets.

In the United States at least, those productions have a root in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration, which aims at returning astronauts to the moon no later than 2020 and then pushing outwards to Mars and beyond.

China too — with its steady string of human spaceflight successes and lofty space station and lunar plans — provides a real-life hook, in a time where human spaceflight seems to lack the emphatic and unified public support that pushed NASA to the moon during the Apollo era. Some members of Congress have even said the United States is already in a new space race with China, and already losing.

“I certainly do think that if the American public thought that the Chinese were going get to Mars first, there would be a huge groundswell of support for this kind of mission,” Lewis said, adding that in "Race to Mars," the rivalry offers a dramatic angle.

But still Mars, it seems, continues to beckon.

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Cosmic Log: A real-life race to Mars?

Two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have surpassed all expectations as they continue to roll across the Martian surface, more than two Earth years since landing on the Red Planet. A new Martian satellite — NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — arrived in orbit this year and is slowly honing its orbit into a circular path.

NASA also hopes to launch its Phoenix lander toward Mars in August 2007, while Europe and Canada plan missions of their own.

”If ["Race to Mars"] does in some small way get people thinking and talking about a mission to Mars, I think we would have done a really great thing,” Lewis said.

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