In the early 1950s, while the space race was still taking shape, German-American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun pushed the U.S. to look beyond just the moon. His audacious plan, called “The Mars Project,” called for humans to visit the Red Planet as early as 1965 using a fleet of 10 ships crewed with 70 astronauts.
In hindsight, it’s a good thing NASA settled for the moon. “The Mars Project” would’ve killed every astronaut on board; von Braun didn’t know about the deadly radiation of deep space or the scant martian atmosphere. NASA only learned about those things as it started exploring the solar system with robotic spacecraft.
And the more we learned about the Red Planet, the less feasible human missions there seemed to become.
When NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft made the first flyby of Mars in 1965, the probe shattered a century of sci-fi dreams, revealing an arid, desolate world pockmarked with craters. In 1971, Mariner 9 entered orbit around Mars and was greeted with a massive global dust storm. But as the thin skies cleared, the spacecraft was able to map Mars’ surface, finding Valles Marineris — a tectonic crack that, on Earth, would stretch roughly from the Grand Canyon to Orlando. In 1976, the Viking landers touched down on the martian surface and tested the soil for signs of life. And although some still question the results, most scientists now agree Mars is largely a barren wasteland.
