Holsworthy Mark Show

Commander Douglas Stansfield, age 31, an astronaut in the year 1987, is scheduled in six months to be sent on an exploratory mission to a planetary system roughly 141 light-years from Earth. Although the spacecraft will travel at the rate of 7 times the speed of light, the round trip will still take forty years. To save him the ordeal of 40 years of loneliness, he is to be placed in (newly developed) suspended animation for the twenty-year trip to his goal, and again for the twenty-year return trip. During his time in suspended animation, he will age only a few weeks. Shortly before his mission, he meets and is enchanted by his young colleague, Sandra Horn. They meet that night, after only three and half hours, they declare their love for each other, and lament the fact that when Stansfield returns, Sandra will be an old woman. Forty years later, Stansfield returns to Earth, a forgotten pioneer. The discoveries he made on his mission were independently achieved earlier by technology developed after his depa