Von Braun and Life to Mars

In the 1950s, a former German rocket engineer, working on missiles for the U. S. Defense Department, began writing about and advocating human spaceflight to Mars. To be sure, there would be gradual steps to Mars, said Wernher von Braun in a series of articles in Colliers, a high-circulation magazine at the time. He painted a sequence of technical developments over years. Between 1952 and 1954, von Braun proclaimed that there would first be a spaceship, then a space station, and then a trip to the Moon. But Mars was the ultimate destiny for human spaceflight, although such a voyage might not come for many decades. Von Braun, an engineer, whose brilliance was matched by his passion for ex­ploration, believed that advances in rocketry would someday make extending human life to Mars possible. Von Braun’s stepping-stone approach to Mars was called by some “the von Braun paradigm.”4

Von Braun subsequently expanded the articles into four books. In his 1956 book (coauthored by Willy Ley) he assumed that plant life would greet visitors from Earth. However, it was not life on Mars that most interested von Braun; it was developing technology to take human beings to Mars that he craved.5 For scientists and engineers who wanted to know if life existed on Mars or humans could get to Mars, there was a barrier before 1957. Technology to escape Earth’s gravity did not exist—or at least had not been demonstrated—prior to Sputnik. The Soviet Union in 1957 opened the space frontier in a move that shocked the United States and the world. All of a sudden, dreams about space exploration came closer to reality.

All the same, the two motivations to explore Mars proved a double-edged sword for Mars advocates. The von Braun approach was pursued initially by engineers who emphasized developing technology to take humanity into space. The intellectual descendants of Lowell were scientists interested in discovering life through robotic means. The scientists were mainly users of space technol­ogy, not developers. The relation between the robotic program and the human spaceflight advocates was problematic from the outset. The engineers behind human spaceflight wanted to go to the Moon. They wanted to go to Mars too, but the Moon came first, since getting there was their immediate interest, and the von Braun stepping-stone approach was a method to which they subscribed. Many scientists did not find the Moon particularly interesting, especially those anxious to discover extraterrestrial life. They looked to explore Mars via robotic means for quicker answers to the question, are we alone? The interests were different, and so were the priorities of the two advocacy communities.

Thus, there was a long dual legacy of fascination with Mars. But to get started in answering this call required going beyond scientists and engineers, to politi­cians. Exploration required a strong additional stimulus, because government

would have to get involved in a substantial way and spend a great deal of money. Just to take an initial step in the Red Planet’s direction would require political will, organization, and the push of a large program. What would get politicians aboard? Which agency in government would take the lead in managing space policy?