As every space enthusiast knows, we will land people on Mars within 20 years.
Of course, we’ve been 20 years away from Mars for the last half-century. Between 1950 and 2000, NASA and various independent groups have come up with more than 1,000 detailed studies for manned Mars missions. Yet not a single one has come very close to fruition. At least on paper, Mars remains an eventual NASA goal, with their latest Curiosity rover seen in some ways as a precursor to human missions.
“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,”
said the agency’s administrator Charles Bolden after
the rover’s successful landing on Aug. 5.
Despite this, Mars is not really on the agency’s radar. After their
Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) probe, set to launch in 2013, NASA has no concrete plans for the Red Planet. “Certainly, nobody’s really serious about sending people to Mars right now,” said historian David Portree, Wired Science’s resident spaceflight history expert and
Beyond Apollo blogger.
There are still plenty of ideas out there, ranging from the extremely ambitious — such as
Elon Musk’s desire to fly to the Red Planet in the next two decades – to the completely bizarre – like the
MarsOne reality-show/one-way-suicide-mission combo.
Here we take a look at historical Mars plans, both crazy and sane, and the few that really stood a good chance at becoming reality.
The von Braun Paradigm
The rocket pioneer
Wernher von Braun was one of the first people to come up with a detailed manned Mars mission based on sound science and engineering. Before he joined NASA, von Braun wrote a book called
Das Marsprojekt, published in West Germany in 1952. In it, he envisioned a grandiose Mars exploration plan with ten 4,000-ton spaceships capable of taking 70 crewmembers to the Red Planet.
Once at Mars, several astronauts would descend to the surface on winged spacecraft that landed on skis at the Martian polar ice cap. They would then complete a 4,000-mile overland trek to the equator to build a basecamp and landing pad to allow the others to descend (at least you can’t accuse von Braun of thinking small!).
A scaled-down version of this epic mission famously appeared to American audiences in a series of articles between 1952 and 1954 in
Collier's magazine. The plans also served as part of the inspiration for Walt Disney’s 1957 ABC program
Mars and Beyond, which you can still see in
its charming entirety online.
Though popularly known, these missions never had any serious support from a space agency and no one knows how much they would have cost. Von Braun estimated in
Das Marsprojekt that fuel alone would come to $500 million – about $4 billion in today's currency. They also suffered from a lack of knowledge about interplanetary space; von Braun’s spaceships heavily defended against micrometeoroids but not against radiation. And Mars’ atmosphere is now known to be far too thin to support the type of winged landers in his plans.
Image: NASA/Ames Research Center
