Mars research culminates his dream

First came the flash, an incredible white light that began lifting slowly into the sky, surrounded by blackness and an eerie silence. Then the boom came across the water, the boom of rocket power that rattled his bones and probably would have given him goosebumps if they weren't already there. In the background, millions of miles above Cape Canaveral, was a little red dot.

"It's pure science fiction," Kounaves said recently, swiveling back and forth in a task chair in his office at Tufts, where he is a chemistry professor, unable to wipe the smile from his face as he described the feeling of watching NASA's Phoenix Mars mission take off. "I don't know how to describe it. Here was this object heading to another planet; we were sending a robot to this little red dot in the sky, to Mars."

For Kounaves, that moment was the culmination of a lot. As a scientist, it was a realization of 12 years of fits and starts and aborted missions, years when his kids grew from toddlers into young adults. For the 59-year-old, raised in a small Montana mining town and weaned on the space race and "Star Trek" - who'd doodled "I want to be an astronaut and go to Mars" in his sixth-grade notebook (which he found recently) - it perhaps meant even more.