The Mars Project

The Mars Project

First German edition book cover
Author	Wernher von Braun
Original title	Das Marsprojekt
Translator	Henry J. White
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Manned mission to Mars
Publisher	Frankfurt: Umschau Verlag (German 1st ed.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press (English 1st ed.)
Publication date	1952
Published in English	1953
Media type	print (hardback)
Pages	81pp (German 1st ed.) 91pp (English 1st ed.)
Followed by	The Exploration of Mars

The Mars Project (German: Das Marsprojekt) is a non-fiction scientific book by the German (later German-American) rocket physicist, astronautics engineer and space architect, Wernher von Braun. It was translated from the original German by Henry J. White and first published in English by the University of Illinois Press in 1953.

The Mars Project is a technical specification for a manned expedition to Mars. It was written by von Braun in 1948 and was the first "technically comprehensive design" for such an expedition. The book has been described as "the most influential book on planning human missions to Mars".

Wernher von Braun developed a fascination for interplanetary flight while he was still at school in Germany. In 1930 he went to university in Berlin to study engineering, and there he joined the Spaceflight Society (Verein für Raumschiffahrt) and later worked on the design of liquid-fuel rockets. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, von Braun was recruited by the German Army to assist in the building of long-range military rockets. He quickly rose through the ranks and became technical leader of the team that developed the V-2 rocket. Towards the end of the war over a thousand V-2s were launched from Germany and bombed England. In 1944 von Braun was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with proposing the building of interplanetary spacecraft instead of military weapons, but he was released after two weeks. As the war drew to a close in early 1945 von Braun and his rocket team fled the advancing Red Army, and later surrendered to American troops. Von Braun and his scientists, plus 100 V-2s, were shipped to the U.S. Army's rocket research facility at Fort Bliss in New Mexico.

In 1948 the U.S. Army's V-2 test program was completed and von Braun used his spare time to write a science fiction novel about a manned mission to Mars. He based his story on comprehensive engineering diagrams and calculations, which he included in an appendix to the manuscript. The novel was not published, but the appendix formed the basis of a lecture von Braun gave at the First Symposium on Spaceflight held at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City in 1951. The appendix was also published in a special edition of the German space flight journal Weltraumfahrt in 1952, and later that year in hardback by Umschau Verlag in West Germany as Das Marsprojekt. It was translated into English by Henry J. White and published in the United States in 1953 by the University of Illinois Press as The Mars Project.