Mission to Mars -- France

The French village of Mars had never seen anything like it

By CNN's Jim Bittermann

MARS, France (CNN) -- There were two missions to Mars under way this weekend.

One was the unmanned space craft which lifted off one week ago, and the other a voyage by French and American astronauts to Mars, France.

The French Mars is a village of 216 people in the mountainous Ardeche region of south-east France.

In this part of France there are no super highways, there are no high-speed trains -- even for many French this area is about as unknown as the red planet itself.

Enter the regional tourist committee which was not afraid to, as the French put it, dream in colour, and invite the astronauts to be the first to explore Mars -- an offer no astronaut could resist.

As a red sun dawned, a local pilot, Xavier de Mongolfier, a distant descendant of the first man to fly in a hot air balloon, prepared to take the astronauts for a ride in his modern balloon and officially land the first astronauts on Mars.

Bad weather scuppered an attempt at a "Mars landing"

But he faced a problem familiar to anyone whose watched a space shuttle launch -- you can never count on the weather. Because of high winds the astronauts never got off the ground.

"Mars we have a problem, it looks like our space craft landed before we did," said one astronaut.

Even if their flight was cancelled, just having the astronauts in town was enough for these Martians who insisted on making permanent imprints of the visitors' sneakers for posterity.

In fact the top Martian, the newly-elected mayor, who has never even flown in a plane, was overwhelmed by the visit.

It is the biggest thing to hit Mars, he said, since the religious wars here more than 300 years ago.

Young people dressed as assorted aliens and bacteria, thought so, too. They took the spaceman on an exploration of the village, crossing canals and finally finding water, which given the fact that it was snowing at the time, did not seem to be all that difficult.

The astronauts pointed out that any one the young people might one day set foot on the planet Mars.

"We think Mars exploration is in our future. It may be a little ways out there possibly but that's the whole essence of being human is that we'd like to explore and Mars is something we have dreamed about and set our sights on," said Leroy Chiao.

The celebrating went on long into the afternoon with the local Blues Brothers band leading the way.

In the end everyone got a little something out of the mission to Mars.

The tourist committee brought some recognition to the Ardeche region, the astronauts brought some attention to the space program, and all of it brought a little life to Mars.

See related sites about Europe

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.