Why the US can’t send humans to Mars

1950s: The Mars Project

In the ’40s and ’50s, no one really knew what they might find on Mars, but they knew getting there would be tricky. One of the first to seriously tackle the problem was Wernher von Braun.

During World War II, von Braun was a member of the Nazi party and created V-2 missiles. After the war, he continued his work on missiles with the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip while also working on a novel called “The Mars Project.” In it, he laid out the first detailed plan to send humans to the Red Planet.

He envisioned a 260-day mission that would launch in 1985 with 10 spaceships and 70 crew members. “He sat down and did the math and created a whole story around it,” Shindell said.

In the late ’50s, von Braun consulted on NASA’s very first 10-year plan, which included sending the first probes to Mars. (Sending humans to Mars would come later.) What started as fiction got closer to reality when von Braun started working at NASA a couple of years later.