****SPOILERS**** On the first US manned mission to Mars the crew of three astronauts Mike Nick & Duncan, Darren McGavin Nick Adams & George De Vires, find the wreckage of a Soviet spaceship that crashed there with one of the survivors a quick frozen cosmonaut, Bill Kelly, in a state of suspended animation. It's later that the Russian defrosted and came back to life to help the surviving US astronaut Mike blast off from the red planet back to earth where his wife Edith, Heather Hewitt, was waiting for him with, by the time he makes his way back there, a new addition to the family.
While on Mars the US astronauts were confronted by this one eyed Polarite who's use of cosmic energy almost ended up wiping them all out. After Duncan was vaporized by a blast on energy by the Polarite it was up to both Mike & Nick and later the Russian astronaut to stop it in order that the mission would be successful and they'll live to tell about it. And for a time it looked like the odds were greatly against them.
****SPOILERS*** It was Nick who in the end gave his life in order to stop the Polarite by walking into his space craft a 10 foot wide silver sphere and kamikaze like blowing it as well as himself to smatterings. It was too bad for Nick that he couldn't come back to his wife Alice, Shirley Parker, whom he promised that this would be his very last trip in outer space which in fact it turned out to be. As for Mike and the Russian cosmonaut their return to earth would happily put a thaw, in their mutual cooperation, on the Soviet/US relations in the Cold War that at the time, 1967-68, was heating up with the war in Vietnam.
While on Mars the US astronauts were confronted by this one eyed Polarite who's use of cosmic energy almost ended up wiping them all out. After Duncan was vaporized by a blast on energy by the Polarite it was up to both Mike & Nick and later the Russian astronaut to stop it in order that the mission would be successful and they'll live to tell about it. And for a time it looked like the odds were greatly against them.
****SPOILERS*** It was Nick who in the end gave his life in order to stop the Polarite by walking into his space craft a 10 foot wide silver sphere and kamikaze like blowing it as well as himself to smatterings. It was too bad for Nick that he couldn't come back to his wife Alice, Shirley Parker, whom he promised that this would be his very last trip in outer space which in fact it turned out to be. As for Mike and the Russian cosmonaut their return to earth would happily put a thaw, in their mutual cooperation, on the Soviet/US relations in the Cold War that at the time, 1967-68, was heating up with the war in Vietnam.