In Wernher von Braun’s early Mars plan, the first landing party would touch down on a polar ice cap. Then came a journey of roughly 4,000 miles across the planet to build a runway for the people still waiting in orbit.
It is an extraordinary detail. Before anyone had sent back a close-up photograph of Mars, an engineer was already calculating how a large expedition might arrive, work and come home.
The von Braun Mars Project belonged to a world before Sputnik and Apollo. Its ambition was enormous: ten interplanetary ships carrying 70 people. Its weak points are just as revealing as its calculations.
A technical plan with a fictional beginning
NASA historian David S. F. Portree’s Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000 traces the proposal to a novel von Braun wrote in 1947–1948. The mathematical appendix became the technical work published in German in 1952 and in English as The Mars Project in 1953.
The novel supplied the setting; the appendix supplied the calculations. The published technical proposal grew out of fiction, but it asked practical questions about transport, fuel, crews and landing.
Von Braun was then working in the United States after developing rockets for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The Mars proposal preceded the achievements that would later make him a prominent figure in American spaceflight.
Why send a fleet?
Andrew Chaikin’s 2024 NASA-hosted review of Mars crew planning describes a 70-person expedition, with 50 intended to land. The ships would be assembled in Earth orbit before departure. Getting the parts, supplies and propellant there was a huge operation in its own right.
The larger group made room for specialists. It also reduced dependence on any one crew member: an expedition cut off from immediate help needed people who could handle unfamiliar failures.
Multiple ships offered another form of insurance. As Portree explains, people aboard a failed vessel could move to another, accepting more crowded conditions. A fleet therefore answered a survival question, even while making the expedition far heavier and more expensive to launch.
Every spare berth came at a cost. Another ship needed more equipment, fuel and maintenance, all of which first had to be launched from Earth.
The runway nobody had surveyed
Portree describes seven ships that would remain in space and three carrying winged landing vehicles. Von Braun chose a polar ice cap for the first touchdown because he believed it offered a reliably smooth surface. The advance party would then travel to an equatorial base site and prepare a strip for the other landers.
That sequence depended on several things going right before most of the surface crew could arrive: a safe landing, a workable overland route and a runway suitable for the waiting vehicles. The scheme makes the expedition feel unusually tangible. It also shows how far planning could run ahead of geographical knowledge.
Wings depend on the air around them. A vehicle designed to glide through one atmosphere cannot simply be expected to perform the same way in a much thinner one. The planet’s actual conditions would have to become part of the design.
Mars changed when spacecraft reached it
Mariner 4 flew past Mars in July 1965. Its pictures showed a heavily cratered portion of the surface. When its radio signal passed through the atmosphere, the measurements indicated low surface pressure.
This was a different kind of knowledge from viewing a small planetary disc through a telescope. Spacecraft could measure conditions that decided whether a proposed landing system would work. Later landers returned views from the ground, including the Viking 2 photographs featured by Curiosmos.
Von Braun’s own proposals changed. Chaikin’s review records a 1956 version, developed with Willy Ley, with a crew of twelve and nine people assigned to the surface. “The plan” was already a sequence of revisions.
The ten-ship expedition never flew. Yet it imagined the crew’s problems in remarkable detail, down to a runway awaiting construction on another planet. Its hardest question remains familiar: how much equipment, expertise and room for failure should people take when help is months away?
