Die Marsprojekt - Wernher von Braun's Dream
Humans have dreamed of travel to the planets for centuries, but the first actual outline of how this would be done was presented in 1952 by rocket engineer Dr. Wernher von Braun. Von Braun had built the German V-2 missile during World War II, but had moved to the United States after the war. Von Braun's plan involved a fleet of interplanetary spaceships carrying dozens of men to Mars. The total mass of the spaceships was thousands of tons. To many in 1952, therefore, Mars seemed like a distant target; after all, nobody had placed a single pound of matter in orbit around Earth at that time. Even worse, from von Braun's perspective, the US government was not particularly interested in space research.

All that changed literally overnight on October 4, 1957, when the USSR placed Sputnik I in orbit. Sputnik I made headlines around the world as Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev declared that America had been beaten. The United States felt the need to prove its superiority over Communism in large technological projects, and within four months had launched a satellite of its own. The Race for Space was on.

America was embarrassed as the Soviet space program accomplished one "first" after another. In 1959, a Russian satellite reached the Moon. In 1961, the Russians put a man in orbit around the Earth. In response, US President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would send astronauts to the Moon by 1970; Kennedy hoped that such a distant destination as the Moon would give America time to catch up with the Soviets in the Space Race.

Plans from The Apollo Era
As the 1960s progressed, NASA headed for the Moon, one step at a time. Robotic spacecraft were sent to the Moon to take close-up pictures of the surface. Meanwhile, astronauts performed space walks in Earth orbit and docked spacecraft to each other. By 1966, NASA was not only planning for the Moon, it was discussing (but not funding) human missions to Mars.

Unfortunately, federal support for space began to collapse around that time. One reason was money. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congressional politicians were faced with a budget crisis as they fought a war-on-poverty at home and a war-in-Vietnam abroad. Many Americans felt that space had to be placed on a "back burner" while national priorities dictated deep cuts in the NASA budget. Then, in January 1967, three astronauts were killed on their Florida launch pad when their spacecraft caught fire. Finally, the belief in expansion that characterized America during the nineteenth century was replaced with a belief that our economic system was forever restricted to the confines of a finite, blue globe: Earth. Millions of Americans saw space exploration not as a means of expanding civilization to include new resources from the planets and asteroids, but instead as a diversion of resources from urgent needs down here.

Nevertheless, NASA pressed ahead with the Moon landing, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar soil. Around that time, some in the space agency still hoped to send humans to Mars; they were backed up by a few politicians, such as Vice President Spiro Agnew, and all the major aerospace companies. To those companies, humans-to-Mars was a financial dream: NASA would build huge nuclear-powered rockets to send two multi-hundred-ton spaceships to Mars with a launch scheduled for November 1981. Upon arrival at Mars in August 1982, the spaceships would go into orbit (using, of course, nuclear rockets.) Eight men would fly down to the surface of Mars in a Mars Excursion Module, stay there for one month, and then fly back up to the orbiting mother ships. The ships would return to Earth by a rapid, high-energy, propellant-intensive trajectory which left Mars in October 1982, encountered Venus in February 1983, and finally arrived back at Earth in August 1983.

The expense of this scheme made it attractive to the aerospace industry, which expected contracts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars for all the machinery necessary for the Mars mission. This very same expense made Mars rather unattractive on Capitol Hill and with President Richard Nixon, and the humans-to-Mars program failed to achieve political liftoff.

The "Mars Underground"
Throughout the 1970s, the humans to Mars idea was discussed occasionally, but NASA quickly chose not to make a real effort to get such a program underway. However, a group at the University of Colorado at Boulder began making efforts to change this as the 1980s began. In 1981, the Boulder group hosted a conference, Case for Mars I, about the possibility of sending people to explore the Red Planet. This group, which became known as the Mars Underground, began holding conferences every three years: Case for Mars II in 1984 and Case for Mars III in 1987.

Case for Mars II was notable for the participation of Thomas Paine, who had been the NASA administrator when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. In 1985, Paine recommended to the Reagan administration that the USA send astronauts to Mars. In response, NASA began planning a humans-to-Mars mission, but did not actually fund anything.

In 1987, a NASA commission chaired by Sally Ride (the first woman to fly on a US spacecraft) designed a mission that would send two spacecraft to Mars: a cargo ship and a piloted ship. The cargo ship would fly first and go into Mars orbit. Then the crew would fly to Mars on the piloted ship and dock to the cargo ship. They would fly down to the surface of Mars in a small module from the cargo ship, spend two weeks on the surface, and fly back up to the cargo ship. Then the piloted ship would depart for Earth. The proposal did not receive any support from the Reagan administration, in part because of the multi-hundred-billion dollar price tag, but also because Reagan was more interested in Star Wars than Mars.

The Short Life of the "Space Exploration Initiative"
The year of 1989 brought a change of administrations, and a change of attitudes toward space. On the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing - July 20, 1989 - President George Bush stood in front of the Smithsonian next to the Apollo 11 crew. He announced his thirty-year plan for human exploration of space: a space station by 1999; a Moon landing by 2009; a Mars landing by 2019. The program was to be called SEI, the Space Exploration Initiative.

NASA formed another commission to decide how to go about accomplishing the Mars landing. Their report, called the Ninety Day Report, was a slightly updated version of the Apollo-era Mars plan, demonstrating how far the NASA bureaucracy had moved in twenty years. According to the Ninety Day Report, a 1000-ton interplanetary spaceship would be built by astronauts at the Space Station. It would be powered by nuclear rockets and fly to Mars in perhaps six months. (There were several variants of this design advocating longer or shorter flight times.) Upon reaching Mars, the astronauts would enter a Mars Excursion Module, stay on the surface for about a month, and then blast back into orbit to rendezvous with the rest of their spaceship. Then they would fire the spaceship's rocket and head for Venus, where that planet's gravity would slingshot the spacecraft back to Earth.

The cost: $450 billion. Because of that figure, Congress made sure that NO funds were appropriated towards any research for Mars missions (an action that continues to this day), and the visionary Space Exploration Initiative died a quick death.

Mars Direct: A New Plan
While NASA bureaucrats stuck to this ridiculously expensive mission plan, Dr. Robert Zubrin of Martin Marietta was designing a much cheaper Mars program. The key to Zubrin's plan was in-situ resource utilization - that is, the use of Martian air for propulsion. By elemental composition, Zubrin's choice of rocket fuel for the Mars-to-Earth journey (methane/oxygen) was 5% hydrogen, 15% carbon, and 80% oxygen. Since the Martian air contains both the elements carbon and oxygen, Zubrin reasoned, a spacecraft bringing one ton of hydrogen from Earth could produce 20 tons of methane/oxygen rocket propellant. In this way, the mass of the Mars spacecraft was dramatically reduced. Moreover, Zubrin chose a long stay time on Mars that allowed the spacecraft to return to Earth with less fuel. The net result: the total mass of material sent to Mars dropped impressively, from 600 tons to 87 tons. The cost would probably have been about $30 billion, instead of $450 billion.

Zubrin called his plan Mars Direct. NASA ignored it, stuck to its more costly design, and allowed SEI to sink. Neither Bush nor the Democrats attempted to resurrect it. Zubrin, now as President of The Mars Society has spent the last decade speaking to groups all over the world about this plan.

NASA's Design Reference Mission
By 1993, SEI was as dead as a doornail. However, NASA had changed. With new administrator Dan Goldin pushing for "faster, cheaper, and better" robotic missions such as the Mars Pathfinder, the human Mars exploration group at Johnson Space Center designed a cheaper version of the SEI Mars mission design. It was essentially a compromise between Mars Direct and the Ninety Day Report, and became known as the Reference Mission. A cost estimate even emerged from the Reference Mission design: $55 billion.

"A Renewed Spirit of Discovery"
This portion of this history of Humans to Mars is still being written. On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush unveiled his new plan for the reinvigoration of the U.S. space program. Bush called for the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet by 2010 in order to pursue the development of a new "Crew Exploration Vehicle" to carry astronauts beyond low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. Bush committed NASA to return to the Moon no later than 2020, and more likely by 2015, in order to prove the technologies necessary to someday send humans "beyond". While there is no specific deadline for a piloted Mars mission in Bush's vision, NASA seems to understand that the return to the moon is only meant as a waypoint, a "pit-stop", on the way to Mars.

More details will follow over the coming months...