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Let's go to Mars

Von Braun costs out a Mars expedition

Ten ships, seventy crew, and 950 launches to assemble the fleet in Earth orbit: the first Mars expedition worked out in real numbers, and never flown.

A painting looking down on a blue-green, cloud-flecked Earth under a black, starred sky. A black delta-winged rocket stage fills the foreground, its pointed nose up and to the left against the salmon-lit curve of the limb, a fin standing on its long right-hand wing, and the ring of engine nozzles at its tail, nearest the viewer, firing pale yellow-white with the plume running off the bottom of the frame.</alt> <parameter name="credit">
The top half of Chesley Bonestell's cover painting for Collier's of 22 March 1952, the first of the magazine's space issues, showing the third stage of the manned ferry rocket under power 64 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean. That issue set out the space station and the three-stage boosters to build it; the ten-ship Mars expedition ran in the last Collier's space issue, in 1954. · Image: Chesley Bonestell

Wernher von Braun wrote a novel about an expedition to Mars in the late 1940s at Fort Bliss, Texas, where he was posted with the surrendered German rocket team, finishing the German manuscript in mid-1949. No publisher wanted the fiction. They took the appendix, in which he worked out whether the trip would close. It appeared in the German spaceflight journal Weltraumfahrt, then as a short book, Das Marsprojekt, in 1952 and in English as The Mars Project in 1953.

Ten ships, seven crewed and three cargo, would be assembled in Earth orbit from 950 launches of a three-stage reusable booster massing more than twice a Saturn V and producing nearly four times its thrust. Seventy crew. A 260-day Hohmann transfer out, 449 days at Mars while the planets realigned, and 260 days home. Propellant loads, staging masses and transfer geometry are all tabulated.

The crews would descend in winged gliders with a 153-metre span. The first would land on skis on a polar ice cap, the only surface he could be sure was flat; its crew would abandon it and drive 6,500 kilometres overland to the equator to lay a strip for the other two. All of it requires an atmosphere thick enough to fly in. His re-entry calculations assumed 84 millibars at the surface, the accepted figure at the time; Mariner 4 measured 4 to 7 in 1965. On that assumption his glider went subsonic at 39 kilometres altitude; in the real atmosphere that point lies some ten kilometres below ground level.

It was never funded, approved or scheduled. Von Braun took the same material into Collier's between 1952 and 1954, illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, and onto American television with Disney. In The Exploration of Mars in 1956 he cut the fleet from ten ships to two and the crew from seventy to twelve. Later tabulations date the 1952 plan's departure to 1965, the year a 261-kilogram robot with a camera reached Mars.