 What portion of the journey was spent in cryosleep?
Illustrated by WOOD My agent was the one who got me the job of going along to write up the first trip to Mars. "It'll be the biggest break a writer ever got," he told me, two days before blastoff. A you-are-there type of report? Trip time is supposed to take 260 days (that's one way), so we're aimed toward where Mars will be (had better be, or else). A pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist. He has a little cubicle behind the pilot's compartment, with all kinds of maps and rulers and things. He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall (they call it the bulkhead, for some reason or other) table, scratching away with a ballpoint pen on the maps, and now and then calling numbers over a microphone to the pilot. The inertial gravities didn't bother me so much as the gyroscopic spin they put on the ship so we have a sort of artificial gravity to hold us against the curved floor. He passed my room on the way to the galley (the kitchen) for a cup of dark brown coffee (they like it thick) and told me that we were almost past the Moon. They'd have to cover it so I could look out the viewing screen, and they still need it for steering or something. October 3, 1960 I still don't know Jones' first name, though Pat spoke to him, and it sounded like Flants. Also, I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon, with a bluish blurred crescent beyond it that Pat said was the Earth. The back of the Moon isn't much different from the front. Actually, he explained to me, the screen is supposed to keep the image of space locked into place no matter how much we spin. There's just no awesomeness to it, no sense of depth or immensity. Pat slept mostly all day in his compartment, and Jones sat and watched the screen revolve. With Martian rime, Venusian slime, And a radioactive hoe. He says it may prove to be environmentally accurate, but that I should stick to prose. And only 255 days to go. April 1, 1961 I've skipped over the last 177 days or so, because there's nothing much new. And only 78 days to go. June 1, 1961 Only 17 days to go.
 They did not use cryosleep.
 4 months  They did not use cryosleep.  6 months  8 months