Project Mars: A Technical Tale

Based on Wikipedia: Project Mars: A Technical Tale

The Rocket Scientist Who Predicted Elon

In 1949, a German rocket scientist working at a dusty Army base in New Mexico wrote a science fiction novel about the first human mission to Mars. The story described a Martian civilization governed by ten men, led by an elected official called "the Elon."

Seventy years later, the richest man on Earth—named Elon—would dedicate his fortune to getting humans to Mars.

Coincidence? His father says no.

This is the strange story of Wernher von Braun's unpublished novel, a book rejected by eighteen publishers, buried for nearly six decades, and now remembered mostly for a single word that reads like prophecy.

A Rocket Man With a Story to Tell

Wernher von Braun was not your typical science fiction author. He was the architect of Nazi Germany's V-2 rocket program, the man who later built the Saturn V that carried Americans to the Moon, and perhaps the most influential rocket engineer in history. In the late 1940s, he found himself at Fort Bliss, a military base straddling the Texas-New Mexico border, working for his former enemies.

The war was over. The space age had not yet begun. Sputnik was still eight years away. And von Braun had time on his hands.

So he wrote a novel.

He called it Marsprojekt, and he wrote it in German—the language he still thought in, despite now working for the United States Army. The story imagined a human expedition to Mars set in the far-off future of 1980, just thirty years away. But this was no mere fantasy. Von Braun was incapable of imagining space travel without doing the math.

The novel came with an appendix. A technical appendix. One filled with orbital mechanics, propellant calculations, and engineering specifications for a ten-ship flotilla that could actually reach Mars. Von Braun had essentially designed a real Mars mission and wrapped a story around it.

Rejected Eighteen Times

In 1950, a U.S. Navy officer named Henry J. White translated the novel into English. The Department of Defense reviewed it and cleared it for publication, noting with some amusement that von Braun's visions were "too futuristic to infringe on classified matters."

Von Braun began shopping the manuscript to American publishers.

They all said no. Eighteen of them, one after another.

It's worth pausing to appreciate how spectacularly wrong those editors were. Here was possibly the world's foremost rocket engineer, a man who had already built weapons that terrorized London and would soon build rockets that reached the Moon, offering a scientifically grounded vision of Mars exploration. And nobody wanted it.

The novel languished. But the appendix found a different fate.

The Technical Appendix That Changed Everything

In 1952, a West German publisher released von Braun's technical appendix as a standalone book called Das Marsprojekt. The following year, the University of Illinois Press published an English translation under the title The Mars Project.

This was not a novel. It was a blueprint.

Von Braun laid out detailed specifications for getting humans to Mars using technology that could realistically be developed. He described a fleet of spacecraft assembled in orbit around Earth. He calculated fuel requirements, trajectory options, and mission timelines. He addressed life support, cosmic radiation, and the psychological challenges of long-duration spaceflight.

The book became influential among engineers and space enthusiasts. It helped establish von Braun as not just a rocket builder but a visionary—someone who could see beyond the next launch to the ultimate destination.

Meanwhile, the actual story remained locked away.

What the Novel Actually Says

The plot of Project Mars reads like a Cold War fever dream mixed with nineteenth-century speculation about Martian canals.

In von Braun's future history, a devastating war between East and West ends in the 1970s. The Western powers win, aided by an orbiting space station called Lunetta that drops nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union. (Von Braun, who had built missiles for one totalitarian regime and now worked for the country opposing another, apparently had no qualms about imagining orbital nuclear bombardment.)

After the war, Earth unifies under something called the United States of Earth. Soon, astronomers on Lunetta confirm what American astronomer Percival Lowell had claimed decades earlier: Mars has canals. Artificial canals. Evidence of intelligent life.

This was not an outlandish premise in 1949. Lowell had died in 1916 still insisting that the "canals" he observed through his telescope were engineered waterways built by a dying Martian civilization desperately trying to survive on an increasingly arid world. The idea captured public imagination for decades, even as other astronomers grew skeptical. Von Braun played with this notion, imagining what might happen if Lowell turned out to be right.

The President orders a mission to determine whether these Martians pose a threat.

The Journey

This is where von Braun's engineering obsession takes over. The expedition launches from Lunetta with ten spacecraft. Von Braun describes the construction process, the supply runs from Earth, the careful preparation required before departure.

He spends pages on life support systems. He explains the dangers of cosmic rays—high-energy particles from deep space that can damage human tissue. He discusses weightlessness and its effects on the body, a topic that would become urgent once real astronauts began spending extended periods in orbit.

He even addresses boredom.

This last detail reveals something about von Braun's imagination. He understood that a months-long voyage through empty space would test human psychology in ways no one had experienced. The technical challenges were immense, but so were the human ones.

Three winged landing craft eventually descend to the Martian surface. Von Braun, ever the engineer, describes the aerodynamics required to land on a planet with an atmosphere much thinner than Earth's.

The Martians

Once the humans land, the novel takes a sharp turn from hard science fiction into something closer to philosophical allegory.

Von Braun admitted this in his preface. After standing on "the solid, scientific platform" of real physics and engineering during the voyage, readers would find that "this part of the story may offer opportunities for ruminative philosophical reflection." The Martian canals were speculation. The inhabitants were pure fiction.

The Martians turn out to be humanoid and friendly. They live underground—a reasonable adaptation for a world with little atmosphere to shield against radiation and temperature extremes. Their civilization is ancient and benevolent, what von Braun calls a "super-civilization."

They have technology far beyond Earth's: underground transportation systems, organ transplants (still largely theoretical in 1949), and presumably whatever engineering prowess built those canals.

And they have a government.

The Elon

Chapter 24 of the novel is titled "How Mars is Governed." In it, von Braun describes a Martian political system led by ten men. The leader is elected by universal suffrage for a five-year term and holds the title of "Elon."

The passage is brief and matter-of-fact:

The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled "Elon." Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.

For decades, this detail meant nothing. The novel wasn't even published until 2006, and even then it attracted little attention.

Then came 2021.

Someone noticed that the world's most prominent advocate for Mars colonization—a man who had founded SpaceX explicitly to make humanity a multi-planetary species—shared a name with von Braun's fictional Martian leader. The internet did what the internet does.

Was this prophecy? Time travel? Simulation theory confirmation?

In 2022, Errol Musk, Elon's father, provided a more prosaic explanation. He claimed he was fully aware of the von Braun connection when naming his son. Whether this is true, or whether it's a story constructed after the fact, remains unclear. Errol Musk has a complicated relationship with truth, and with his son.

But the coincidence—if it is one—remains striking.

Why the Novel Matters

As a work of fiction, Project Mars: A Technical Tale has significant limitations. Reviewers who read it after its 2006 publication noted weak characters and sometimes tedious technical detail. The translation from German occasionally uses archaic English words that don't quite fit.

But the novel matters for reasons beyond literary merit.

It captures a moment when space travel existed only in imagination and engineering notebooks. Nothing human-made had yet reached orbit. The Moon landings were two decades away. Mars remained a blurry reddish disk in even the best telescopes. And yet here was a man who had already built rockets capable of reaching space, mapping out in precise detail how humans might one day reach another planet.

The novel also reveals von Braun's broader concerns. Beyond the engineering, he was thinking about what space exploration might mean for humanity. His Martians serve as a mirror, a more advanced civilization that has figured out ethics, morality, and "the responsible use of technology"—lessons von Braun perhaps wished his own species would learn.

This was, after all, a man who had built weapons for Hitler. His V-2 rockets killed thousands of people in London and Antwerp. They were also assembled by concentration camp prisoners, many of whom died in the production process. Von Braun's postwar career in America represented a kind of redemption narrative, one where the same expertise that had served evil ends might now serve humanity's highest aspirations.

The novel hints at this tension. The future Earth in Project Mars has survived a nuclear war and unified under a single government. Technology has brought both destruction and salvation. The question hanging over the story is whether humanity can learn to use its capabilities wisely—or whether it will destroy itself first.

The Long Road to Publication

In the late 1950s, a Sunday newspaper supplement called This Week published excerpts from the still-unpublished novel. The magazine focused not on technical details but on von Braun's "philosophies on space flight and the future of humanity." It was the ideas, not the equations, that captured popular attention.

By then, von Braun had become a public figure. He appeared on Disney television programs explaining space travel to American families. He graced magazine covers. He testified before Congress about the urgent need for a space program. The man who had built Hitler's vengeance weapons was now the friendly face of American space exploration.

But the novel remained unpublished.

Von Braun died in 1977, having seen his Saturn V rockets carry humans to the Moon and back. He never saw his Mars expedition realized—not even in fiction.

Nearly thirty years after his death, in 2006, a Canadian publisher called Apogee Books finally released Project Mars: A Technical Tale. The book included illustrations by Chesley Bonestell, an artist whose paintings of space had inspired a generation of scientists and engineers. Bonestell's work gave visual form to von Braun's words, depicting spacecraft and planetary landscapes with technical precision and romantic beauty.

As of 2025, the original German text of Marsprojekt has still never been published.

Assessing a Prophecy

How accurate was von Braun's vision?

The Martian canals turned out not to exist. They were an optical illusion, artifacts of the human eye and brain trying to find patterns in blurry telescope images. When spacecraft finally reached Mars in the 1960s and 1970s, they found a cold, barren world with no canals, no civilizations, and almost certainly no life.

The political predictions were equally wrong. There was no devastating East-West war in the 1970s, no United States of Earth, no Lunetta dropping nuclear missiles on Moscow. The Cold War ended not in nuclear apocalypse but in the quiet collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The technical details, however, hold up remarkably well. Von Braun's basic approach—assembling spacecraft in orbit, using multiple vehicles, carefully managing life support and radiation exposure—remains the template for most serious Mars mission proposals today. The specific numbers have changed as technology has advanced, but the fundamental engineering logic was sound.

And then there's the Elon.

Whether coincidence, family legend, or something stranger, the fact remains: a German rocket scientist writing in the New Mexico desert in 1949 gave his fictional Martian leader a name that now belongs to the man most likely to actually get humans to Mars.

Von Braun would probably appreciate the irony. He spent his career trying to turn science fiction into science fact. In at least one small way, he succeeded beyond anything he could have imagined.

The Book as Artifact

Today, Project Mars: A Technical Tale functions less as entertainment than as historical document. It shows us how one of the twentieth century's most important engineers thought about humanity's future in space. It captures Cold War anxieties and nineteenth-century astronomical misconceptions. It reveals the technical challenges that still face Mars mission planners and the human challenges that receive less attention.

It also reminds us that great engineers sometimes make mediocre novelists—and that mediocre novels can still contain ideas worth preserving.

For anyone interested in space exploration, von Braun's book offers something valuable: a window into the moment before spaceflight became real, when the journey to Mars existed only in equations and imagination. Everything that came after—Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, SpaceX—grew from the soil that von Braun and his contemporaries prepared.

The novel failed as commercial fiction. But as a vision of what might be possible, it succeeded in ways that no bestseller ever could.

And somewhere in its pages, waiting to be discovered for seventy years, was a word that would one day mean something no one in 1949 could have predicted.

The Elon.