The Creation of the Space Trilogy

In reading the Space Trilogy I was intrigued by Lewis’ description of Malacandra aka Mars.  This book was written before man entered space or Sputnik orbited the earth. We often speak in class on how different landscapes present to us different mythical creatures.  I was fascinated by his description of mars because we now know what it looks like.  Much like a book being turned into a play or movie, our exploration of mars and space has limited our imagination in some respects.  We know for example, Mars is a barren surface composed of red rock and little else.  However Lewis describes a very different scene using descriptions such as “a pale blue sky”, “a watercolor world”, “the shore of a lake” and clouds that looked like, “the top of a gigantic red cauliflower.”  Because of these, now known to be ridiculous descriptions, we as the reader no longer see Mars but picture an entirely different world altogether.  I wonder, how would the description of the planets and space would have changed in Lewis’ writing, if the book was written following more space exploration and how would that have changed the overall story?