 Is SpaceX's new plan to go to Mars for the first time ever with 100 people completely insane? Well, maybe not, according to Werner von Braun. We're going to look at an early Mars mission proposal today on Vintage Space. Werner von Braun is perhaps best known as the lead architect behind the Saturn family of rockets, most notably the Saturn V that took Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. But he wasn't just about big rockets and going to the moon, he'd had dreams of spaceflight his entire life, and one of his early targets was Mars. von Braun first developed his idea of how to go to Mars when he was stuck at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico in the late 1940s. This is after he'd been brought into the United States under Operation Overcast and before his whole team had been moved over to Huntsville, Alabama to start developing what became the Redstone family of missiles. His idea focused on using a shuttle of sorts, or a sort of space ferry, to go between Earth and orbit to build a larger space station from which missions could go to Mars. He presented his basic idea at a conference in the early 1950s, which was then taken up by a journalist for Collier's Magazine. The result was a multi-issue series of articles in which von Braun expanded his idea of what spaceflight should look like, including how to go to Mars. This series of articles ultimately served as the jumping off point for the Disney Tomorrowland series. This was the series that presented viewers across America with von Braun's idea of how to go into space to the moon and ultimately to Mars. The mission he had in mind was anything but simplistic. von Braun imagined his mission to Mars would start from Johnston Island, a point some 940 miles west and slightly south of Hawaii. This was the equatorial launch site from which missions could launch to build the ferry that would ultimately go to Mars in Earth's orbit. The mission was not going to launch and go straight to Mars without orbital construction. The winged glider, or space ferry, if you will, was designed to take building supplies sections of the spacecraft and also excess fuel up into orbit. As it came together, all the excess fuel would be added into tanks that would ultimately propel the mission to Mars and back to Earth again. von Braun imagined that these ferry rockets, or the winged glider, would be completely reusable. The glider, or ferry, would be the rocket's third stage. The second and first stage would be left to fall in the Pacific Ocean, where they could be recovered, refurbished, and reused. He ultimately imagined that 46 stacks of this rocket with glider could be launched nine hundred and fifty times to assemble the entire fleet in Earth orbit. By the time everything was ready, it would be a fleet of ten ships ready to go to Mars. Seven of them would be manned and three would be cargo ships, carrying extra supplies and anything else the crew might need on their very long journey. It would be a 260-day transit to Mars. Once there, the entire fleet would go into orbit around the red planet and then look for a good landing spot. There would be an advance guard of sorts that would make the first landing, because their landing vehicle would be different. At the time, many thought that Mars's poles would actually have dry ice kind of snow so that a vehicle could land on skis rather than wheels. That was thought to be a safer bet than hoping that the land would be smooth enough like a dry lake bed for a runway landing. So the advance guard would land in a vehicle with skis as opposed to wheels at the Martian Pole. They would then travel down to the planet's equator to set up a runway for the rest of the fleet to land, because these vehicles would land on wheels. Only 50 of the crew of 70 would actually land on Mars. The other 20 would stay in orbit, minding the store as it were, and also running experiments from orbit. Once the surface crew had finished their exploration of Mars, they would board their landing vehicles, which would have been popped upright, to launch into Martian orbit to board the main ships of the fleet to then fire the engines to go back to Earth. Basically, when Brown's idea was, if you're going to go all the way to Mars, take a lot of people, do a lot of science, and really make that trip worthwhile. When you're going as far as Mars, it doesn't totally work to send a very small crew just to check out the technology. So he wasn't ultimately in favor of something like the Apollo program for Mars. Now, when Brown knew in the early 1950s that this mission was complete fantasy. When he first studied the idea and started writing it down in the 1940s, and then again to the American public through colliers in the early 1950s, no one had been in space or hadn't even been satellites. But he still knew that the technology existed, or at least existed in Potentia enough to get this kind of mission off the ground. So admittedly, the link between SpaceX and Fun Brown is a little bit tenuous in this case, but there's still some interesting parallels to draw. Fun Brown had to assemble his fleet in Earth orbit because he was dealing with heavier materials, whereas SpaceX has the advantage of new materials like carbon fiber tanks that will keep the launch weight ultimately quite low so that he can launch 100 people on a single rocket, which is kind of phenomenal. But there is the parallel that both missions involve massive crews, which kind of makes sense. If you're going to go all the way to Mars, don't go with two people and have them walk on the surface for two hours and then come home and tell us what they saw. It makes sense to send a lot of people to get a lot of data, do a lot of science, and ultimately learn a lot more about Mars so that you get more for your launch. Couple of quick book recommendations for you guys on this topic. Of course, Werner Fun Brown's narrative telling of his early mission to Mars. This was originally published as Death's Mouse Project in the 1940s and has been republished in English as Project Mars. This one is specifically from Apogee Books. You can find their website, I'll link it below. They have great titles and this one is available if you'd like to actually read Fun Brown's own narrative version of his mission to Mars. I also talk a fair bit about Fun Brown's mission to Mars and where does that fit in with the context of developing rocketry and early ideas of manned spaceflight in the 1950s leading into the launch of Sputnik. You can find that in my book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity. I will have links to order this below as well. So all technical things aside, I'm curious to know what you guys think about the idea of just sending a mission to Mars with 70 or 100 people as opposed to a small Apollo-style mission of maybe three or five people. What do you think is the best way to go to Mars for the first time? If there's no right answer, I'm just curious. Let me know your thoughts and any questions you have in the comments below and of course topics you would like to see covered in future episodes. Be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram for daily vintage-based content and with new videos going up every week. Subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.