I had my spacesuit on; I was just awaiting the helmet, which was being held by a technician. The night was still with us; we would be launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan just after dawn. I had slept poorly and was half awake when they came to get me at 0300. I always sleep poorly before a flight, and the fact that this one was to go to Mars didn’t make my fretting any easier.

The Americans didn’t know what we planned. They had been talking about going to Mars for years, their billionaires were spending billions of roubles testing spacecraft to take them there, and they still hadn’t even managed to get to the moon for over fifty years. We were just quietly getting on with it; we would be first.

The plan was simple. We would launch into a transpolar orbit, and then, just when the world expected us to de-orbit and come back to Earth, we would initiate the nuclear drive and head to Mars. The world would gasp. Every day over the next two weeks more ships would launch, all expected to arrive and land in the same area of Mars, each ship carrying supplies that we would need.

The other ships would actually overtake us; they could accelerate and, crucially, decelerate at a rate faster than we humans could tolerate. When we land on Mars, there will be a small amount of fuel left in our ship. That would be used for landing burns on our return to Earth. We would use the nuclear propulsion motors to take off from Mars; we didn’t have to worry about radiation because the planet was basically dead.

“Mica”, the technician said, “your helmet.”

I turned to face him, and he placed the helmet over my head, twisting it and then securing it in place.

“Comms check, Mica,” said a voice from mission control in my helmet.

“Receiving ten by ten,” I replied.

“Affirmative,” came the voice back. I flipped open my visor and was back in the room, so to speak. I guess civilians don’t appreciate how claustrophobic a space suit is. You do lose a lot of peripheral vision, and you also lose all the peripheral sounds. In the spacesuit all you hear is your breathing and whatever comes over the radio.

I turned and faced Dimitri Andropov; he was to be my co-pilot on this mission. He had just completed his helmet check, and all we had to do now was await the shuttle to the Gagarin launch complex.

“Potoropis’, prishlo Vremya,” the voice came over the comms, telling us to hurry. The technician pointed to the door; the shuttle was waiting. The journey to the launch complex was surprisingly bumpy, but then funds were low, and none were wasted on infrastructure maintenance, at least not infrastructure that was not directly involved in the launch.

We got in the small lift that took us up the launch tower, and then we walked across the crew access arm to the open hatch. Dimitri went in first; as the co-pilot, he sat on the far side of the capsule. I went in next, and once secured in my seat, a technician tapped my helmet, and “khoroshaya skorost” came over the helmet, wishing us good speed.

There were a lot of checks to do before launch; most of Dimitri’s checks were a cross-check of mine, but he had some of his own. Not many, but some, and I did not have to cross-check his. Time passed, almost without noticing, and then it was time. The launch was always tense. Would we die, unknowingly, in a huge explosion? Would we be launched to relative safety by the capsule eject, only to land in what was deemed to be a safe zone, although somewhat painfully, or would all go well and we would launch?

There was a shudder, a loud noise, a lurch, and an even louder noise, and then someone seemed to punch me in my chest, and I was thrust hard back onto the seat. A lot of vibration, and a huge weight on my chest. We had launched; no explosion, no escape capsule, we had launched. A wave of relief passed through me, and I guessed Dimitri too.

The noise stopped, and I guessed we had gone supersonic, but the vibrations and the pressures remained. Eventually there was a lurch, and the pressure stopped pushing. The first stage separated, and then after a moment the pressure on our back returned; the engines on the second stage had ignited. That was the last potential disaster point on the mission to orbit.