Neville recounts a story a close friend of his, an engineer at Hughes, told him about a spacecraft due to photograph Mars, excitedly describing twenty pictures that would take eight hours each to transmit back. The friend hoped the images would show canals suggesting life on Mars, and drew a distinction between the moon as a mere 'spaceship' and the larger ambition of reaching Mars. This matches Mariner 4's historic flyby of Mars on 14 July 1965, the first close-up photographs ever returned from another planet.