Could We Have Got to Mars in 1985?

In 1961 John F Kennedy committed the United States to land a man on the moon, and return him safely before the decade was out. Five years earlier, on October 4th 1957, the Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite into space. The first powered and controlled flight by a human being had occurred just 54 years earlier on December 17th 1903. The human race had gone from a twelve second flight over the hills of Kitty Hawk to landing upon another world within a the span of a single lifetime.

However, soon after the Apollo Moon landings political sentiment and support fell away from the space race. It's easy to look back and dismiss the next steps on our journey into space as being exponentially more difficult, or even impossible within that era. Leaders, political leaders, have said that landings on Mars were beyond our abilities, beyond our resources, and beyond their scope for the last 40 years. This is usually accepted as a matter of fact, given that these and similar statements have been repeated for so long and by so many, it's also not hard to rationalise why. After all, there are countless hungry and dying in this world. People who would benefit infinitely more from a simple vaccination, or course of antibiotics, than the exploration of outer space. Certainly, if we had devoted equal resources to these endeavours for the last forty years, we could judge the course of our journey as a species to be a most noble one, and the decision to delay a Mars landing quite justified. However, history did not unfold that way. While many a great effort was made, the progress of mankind did not follow the curve we would have extrapolated from our history in 1969. Cold wars, jungle wars, oil wars, star wars and wars on terror have occupied taxpayer resources for the last five decades. Tremendous advances have been made in technology and social development, and yet the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen in the western world since the industrial revolution. Avarice and paranoia dominate political thinking, and mass media is used to re-evaluate the truth of ideas again and again, as required, leaving little room for scientific endeavour and human progress. Nations, we are told, can no longer afford such pursuits. So, how far could we have gone had we not turned the gas down on the space race, what would it have meant and what would it have cost?

Just 66 years separates these two events

To gain perspective, we must first go back in time to 1961 and establish a context for what had just been achieved, and what was to be achieved in the next decade. Peace was no more a reality in 1961 than it is today. Two world wars had left Europe in ruins. The great empires of the 19th century were left all but bankrupt. Nuclear weapons and brinkmanship had left the world closer than ever to an apocalypse. News media had vastly gained in reach, and events from around the world were being shared by all people, everywhere. During World War II, mankind had developed the first sub orbital rockets, carrying nothing more than bombs. Soon after the war had drawn to a close, the prospect of a new, and much greater “nuclear war” threatened.

Just as in the 18th and 19th centuries, the great empires had been those that controlled the terrestrial oceans, so it was believed that in the 20th and 21st century, control of space would be the ultimate tactical possession.The quest for mastery over the new ocean led on the new superpowers of planet Earth. Resources were committed and investments made to gather the greatest minds in the world, and into unlocking the great new frontier of space. Rocketry had developed to the point where small satellites, and even human beings could be launched into a low earth orbit, 170 miles above the Earth's surface.

The USSR had struck the first two milestones in this race into space. The first satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first astronaut (or cosmonaut), Yuri Gagarin. From this point forward the United States needed, and demanded, a dramatic surge to come back into the race. America needed an achievement to capture the public imagination. A propaganda victory that would demonstrate the superiority of American Democracy over Soviet Socialism. On these terms, an objective was sought out that could carry the United States into the realm of space as it's conqueror. The great minds were conferred with, and they retorted that a landing on the moon would be possible within the decade, and thereafter the rest of the planets would be reached. Here we are then, in 1961.

Werner Von Braun had taken a great interest in space travel from an early age. Looking up to the pioneers of rocketry, Oberth and Goddard, he had studied and built upon their ideas. Joining amateur rocketry clubs in his early 20s, his knowledge on the subject was noted, and he soon found himself recruited into a German military initiative. By his late twenties he was running a team of over 1000 engineers working on rocket artillery for the German army. At the start of the WWII, he began working on rockets for the Nazis, culminating in the development of the V2, the first sub-orbital rocket system.

Following the war, the United States had captured Von Braun and his team of engineers as spoils of war, as part of Operation Paperclip. They were brought back to America to work upon the Redstone Missiles, a type of intercontinental ballistic weapon. Von Braun though, had long hoped that rockets would one day lead mankind into space, and open the doors of the universe. He saw the exploration of space as the natural course of human development. Just as life had once left the oceans, he believed, it would one day leave the Earth. It was he who had campaigned for the United States to initiate a space program, and it was he who had championed a landing on the moon, and Mars, even as early as 1948. This is evidenced in his extraordinarily detailed book "The Mars Project", which presents a technical study into the design, construction, fuel load and every other practical detail of a mission to Mars. This was a technical book, not science fiction, and was written in 1948, just a year after the sound barrier was first broken. His writings show an extraordinary level of understanding with regards to the challenges of operating in space, which later developments in space flight bear testimony to.

The Mars Project, written in 1948, published 1953. Cover from 1962 edition shown

Von Braun would spend the 1960s working as a Director at NASA, and Chief Architect of the Saturn V rocket. In landing on the moon, the NASA engineers had to develop technologies that were just fledgling curiosities at the time of initiation, but are today commonplace in everyday life. These include integrated circuits, flight computers and freeze dried foods to name just a few. To blaze a trail from Earth to the Moon, engineers opened the doors to entire fields of science, ones still being explored in the present time. Machinery had to be designed and built to work in an environment that nobody had ever seen or experienced. Machinery that had to work with perfect reliability, in spite of extreme temperatures and an array of unknown variables. To this day the Saturn V remains the only craft ever made to have transported human beings beyond earth orbit. In 1961, despite the course of events in the 50 years prior, the final achievements of Project Apollo would have seemed impossible to all but a few. However, to those few, the moon was seen as just the beginning. In 1969, this 'impossible' goal was achieved.

Von Braun was one of those who had always believed, and most critically, one one of those who had indeed made landing on the moon possible. His 1948 book stated that, without any extraordinary advances in technology, a landing on Mars might be possible within 30-40 years. He twice revised this book within his lifetime. Most recently with a new forward which noted that the science of rocketry and other related technologies had advanced to such a point that his earlier estimates had been rendered quite conservative. He also noted that the discovery of the Van Allen belts, amongst other things, meant that certain new considerations would need to be made that were not present in his original 1948 book.

Von Braun was also co-author of "The History Rocketry and Space Travel", along with Frederick L Ordway III. Ordway was then Assistant Director of the American National Air and Space Museum, and was another of space travels great visionaries and authors. In the 1975 edition of this book, the preface discusses the "Space Task Group". This was an advisory board for the United States' long term goals of space exploration. Within this book is described how in the climate of the late 1970s, the recommendations of the Space Task Force were dismissed against doubts as to the worth of the Apollo program. Within the advisory board's proposals was a roadmap to land a human being on Mars. The road map was deemed possible, and in fact possible on a sliding scale of investment. Depending on the investment, we could hope to walk on Mars between 1982 and the early 1990s. As to the cost; $7-10 billion a year for the early option, $4-$6billion a year for the slower paced route. Von Braun died in 1977, with it's chief defender gone, the Apollo program wound down and any hopes of a manned mission to Mars delayed indefinitely. The Unites States Defence budget for that year was $286billion (unadjusted).

Charles Donlan, Robert Gilruth, Maxime Faget, and Robert Piland all of the Space Task Group. August, 1960.

Given the scale of the challenges already attempted and overcome by the people involved, it's hard to believe in the impossibility of a program that was proposed at so modest a relative cost. It is not hard at all to imagine that it was a return to humanity's age old weaknesses, rather than any technological or financial challenges, that killed off any hope of a Mars Landing by 1985.

Now 30 years on, hopes of a mission to Mars are heard again. This time not just from the Unites States, but from space agencies around the world, joined by the enormous resources of private industry. In the 21st century, space promises to be big business. Exploration, settlement and even commercial mining are all being discussed in public and private circles. It seems that mankind is once again ready to take another giant leap forward. But it's hard not to think of what might have been, had we taken this step 30 years ago.