16 Years Ago In Time

Worrying about Soviet dominance in space seems so last century. But in 1988, when TIME ran a cover on the exploration of MARS, the U.S. still fretted about the competition.

After a hiatus of a dozen years, during which neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union mounted missions to Mars, a spacecraft is once again on its way, opening a new era in the exploration of the earth's closest planetary neighbor. During the next decade or so, the Soviets will launch a series of increasingly sophisticated unmanned Mars probes that they hope will culminate in a joint U.S.-Soviet manned mission to the Red Planet by the year 2010 ... While the American space program has been crippled since the Challenger disaster in January 1986, Soviet cosmonauts have been gaining invaluable experience aboard the Salyut and Mir space stations. And though U.S. astronauts are scheduled to return to space this September, NASA administrator James Fletcher concedes that the Soviets are now "way ahead of us in manned flight." If each nation goes its own way, he predicts, the Soviets would land humans on Mars at least five years before the U.S. could.

--TIME, July 18, 1988