Project Mars

In this never-before-printed science fiction novel, Wernher von Braun combines technical fact with a human story line in the way that only a true dreamer can realize. The English translation of an unpublished German-language science fiction novel written by storied German-American rocket physicist Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) in 1949. Set in the 1980s, the novel describes the first human mission to Mars and its encounter with benevolent Martians there. Interest in this novel increased in 2021 when people connected the Martian leader, called the Elon, to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Although the novel was not published for 57 years, von Braun’s appendix to it, which gives technical specifications for an expedition to Mars, was published in English in 1953 by the University of Illinois Press as The Mars Project.