Mars or Bust
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins sailed into the history books aboard Apollo 11, and Armstrong and Aldrin became, respectively, the first and second man to walk on the moon. This unparalleled achievement was, and is, so astonishing that it still stands as the rationale for tackling goals that may be well-nigh impossible: “If we can put a man on the moon…” Sharing historical space as it did with the debauched hedonism of Woodstock, Apollo 11 became for the inimitable Ayn Rand a symbol of what rational mankind could achieve and stood in stark and unrelenting opposition to the mindless, gyrating, drug-addicted, and irrational hippie collective with which she was so frequently disgusted. In fact, though, Apollo 11 is still only the half of it. While the moon landing has the tremendous virtue of having been achieved, credible studies of manned missions to Mars had seen the light of day as early as 1952, when Wernher von Braun’s Das Marsprojekt: Studie einer interplanetarischen Expedition was published, and simultaneous with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects were forecasting and preparing for a future of space exploration on the grand scale.
The 800-pound gorilla was definitely von Braun’s masterwork, published in English as The Mars Project in 1953. His ten-ship Mars flotilla, assembled in orbit by a fleet of 46 proto-space-shuttles and grossing more than 37,000 metric tons altogether, would transport 70 explorers to the Red Planet. Von Braun’s astonishing technical acumen and attention to detail--he was, after all, the father of both the V-2 and the Saturn V, and was sufficiently gifted that Adolf Hitler, Uncle Sam, and Walt Disney all employed him at one time or another--make this slim volume the horse to beat. In his mass calculations, he even accounted for one metric ton of “food wrappings”. The study is some of the most fascinating reading I have ever done, but it is definitely not for the faint of heart, or at least the technically illiterate: von Braun was an engineer, not a novelist. The last sentence in the book is, “In that case, very nearly the whole of earth’s circum-solar velocity becomes a factor and the Doppler shift becomes…298 kilocycles per second.”
NASA itself got into the act by 1960, addressing the Institute of Aerospace Sciences on the subject of its first manned Mars mission proposal before the United States had even put a man into space; Alan Shepard would not mark that milestone until 1961. Von Braun’s fellow V-2 veteran Ernst Stuhlinger took the lead in developing one of the most distinctive models of manned spaceflight to Mars: the nuclear-powered, ion-propelled umbrella, rotating to generate artificial gravity by means of centrifugal force (see Ferris Wheels in Space, February 2002). http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1381... He preserved von Braun’s flotilla architecture--referring to Columbus and the disaster with the Santa Maria was a popular means of justifying the need for multiple ships--but went him one better on the futurist scale (von Braun’s earlier study was concerned with demonstrating feasibility with then-current technology, while Stuhlinger had the luxury of planning on future government research funds) and ended up watching his grand Mars fleet on television in the Disney-produced Mars and Beyond.
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