Imagine a world where NASA's Apollo mission never stopped at the Moon. What if
we had continued to push deeper into the Solar System with human exploration. Do
you think NASA really could have landed people on Mars with nineteen seventies technology.
Well, the top aerospace scientists of the day certainly believed that they could,
and they were so confident in that ability that not just one, but several
plans were drawn up over the years that would serve as a blueprint for human
colonization of the planet Mars before the end of the twentieth century. So today
we are bringing those old visions back to life for a bit of science fiction
escapism. This is the retrofuturistic mission to Mars that never was. This is
the space race. Let's begin our journey in the nineteen forties with a vision
straight from the mind of doctor Werner von Braun, also known as the father
of rocket science and the architect behind NASA's Apollo program that landed the first met
on the Moon. Von Bron got his start in rocketry, designing ballistic missiles
for the Nazi Army in his home country of Germany. Von Bron invented the
V two rocket, which was the first ever long range guided missile. Following
the war, von Bron would be recruited by the United States military and eventually
transferred to NASA, where he would serve as the director of the Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The United States hired a lot of Nazis
back in the late forties and early fifties, which is a whole other video.
Anyway, In his free time between serving Adolph and Uncle sam Berna,
von Braun completed a work that would come to be known as Project Mars.
This was a two hundred and eighty page novel that outlined von Bron's plan for
a crude mission to the Red planet using rocket technology that he was actively developing
at the time. Most of the book is just a fictional story about the
first crew of people traveling to Mars, kind of like a science fiction novel,
except writ by an actual genius rocket scientist with a lot of insider knowledge.
The story section of the novel is bonkers. It's all about human society
in the not so distant future that is finally united in the aftermath of a
catastrophic third World War. Except world piece is maintained by a giant death star
like orbital weapon that instantly obliterates anyone on Earth who steps out of line.
I guess you can take the rocket scientist out of the violent fascist regime,
but you can't take the violent fascism out of the rocket scientist anyway. Beyond
the Nazi and space fan fiction aspect, von Bron filled the later pages of
his book with all of the formulas and calculations that would be required to achieve
Project Mars. The math was there written by the same hand that would go
on to design the Apollo Moon missions, so it feels like a very legitimate
blueprint for interplanetary travel. Most importantly, von Bron had all of his ideas
illustrated in the most amazing retrofuturistic technology, the art style that would clearly go
on to influence generations of science fiction from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey
to Star Wars to Elon Musk. I mean, look at von Bron's Mars
rocket and then look at the starship. According to Project Mars, the first
stage of the mission is to establish a large scale human presence in low Earth
orbit. That means gigantic ring shaped stations that rotate slowly to generate artificial gravity,
and an orbital construction yard where the marsh Fleet would be assembled. One
of von Bron's most famous rocket designs was the massive Faery Rocket, a fully
reusable spaceplane and booster system that would make frequent trips from the Earth's surface,
carrying up materials for the orbital construction projects. From orbit, a massive fleet
of transportation ships, cargo haulers and mars Landers would be assembled one thousand miles
above the Earth. According to von Bron's design, the crew would live in
these big spherical sections of the ships, and each one would be by a
cluster of liquid fueled rocket engines supported by the massive network of fuel tanks that
made up the body of the vehicle. At the time, Vonbron was a
big fan of hypergolic propellants, which are chemicals that will self combust when combined
under pressure. It's a very easy way to start a rocket engine in the
vacuum of space, and it's still commonly used to this day. The Draco
thrusters on a SpaceX Dragon capsule are very small hypergallic rocket engines. Once ready,
the mars Fleet would fire their engines to break free from Earth's gravity and
insert themselves into a direct trajectory for Mars, using the home and transfer window
to achieve the shortest distance between the two planets. Von Bron imagined that it
would be two hundred and sixty days or eight and a half months between leaving
Earth orbit and entering Mars orbit. On approach to Mars, the ships would
turn around and fire their engines again to reduce velocity and settle into a low
orbit around Mars of six hundred and twenty miles above the surface. From here,
the Mars Lander vehicles would separate from their main engines and fuel tanks to
prepare for landing. In von Brun's estimation, these vehicles would function as gliders
through the Martian atmosphere and allow the crew to make a controlled soft touchdown on
the planet's surface. After landing, the main body of the vehicle would be
separated from its glider wings and brought into a vertical position, and now the
crew in their spacesuits would set up their ground station on Mars using supplies that
had been brought down in the massive lander vehicle. These first people would explore
the planet and begin to establish the first human colony on Mars. With their
mission complete, the vertical rockets would blast off from the surface and rejoin the
fleet that has been waiting in orbit. With the crew returned to their transport
ships, the fleet makes another burn of their rocket engines to set a return
trajectory for Earth. Sounds easy enough, right, and in the late nineteen
forties when this plan was created, everything that we just went over seemed abundantly
possible to any well informed rocket scientist. The biggest problem was that we didn't
actually know very much at all about the planet Mars in those days. Even
von Bron himself, with all of his genius, was sure that we could
find ancient canals of running water, lush vegetation, and lakes on Mars,
even an advanced species of aliens. And to be fair, von Bron got
most of his assumptions right, but made a couple of fatal mistakes. Aside
from there being no life on Mars, there's also virtually zero atmosphere, less
than one percent the density of Earth, so a gigantic glider winged rocket plane
like von Bron imagined as his Mars Lander would have never worked in practice.
Moving on to the later nineteen fifties, the plan for human spaceflight to Mars
was becoming a little more refined, and some cutting edge new technologies had entered
the game. For the United States, this was the dawn of the Atomic
Age. Nuclear energy had finally been harnessed to generate electricity, and people at
the time started to believe that nuclear power would become this unlimited energy source that
could power America into the space age. Of course, rocket scientists were already
looking at this technology as a way to power spaceships on long duration flights into
deep space. So we're going to bring in some designs by atomic scientist doctor
Ernst Stulinger. He was a close colleague of Verna von Braun and a fellow
Nazi turned US government asset. Stullinger had updated von Bron's Project Mars concept for
the atomic era. He replaced the hypergolic chemical rocket ships from von Bron's illustrations
with his own nuclear electric spacecraft. Stullinger's Mars plan was so highly regarded that
it ended up on American TV in nineteen fifty seven. While Disney had a
weekly television program back in the day called Disneyland, which was an anthology series
that covered all kinds of different topics. For one episode, Disney wanted to
feature the planets of the Solar System in an episode titled Mars and Beyond.
They drew up all of these wild animations that imagined what aliens from Mercury,
Mars, and Venus might look like. It's awesome, super creative, and
really shows just how curious people of the time were about the nature of the
Solar System. Anyway. To add in a more grounded take on interplanetary exploration,
Disney featured a segment with von Braun and Stulinger where they showed off models
and illustrations of Stulinger's atomic electric Mars Transport, explaining how the human journey to
Mars would play out. Much like in Project Mars, the components and materials
of the giant nuclear ship would be transported into space by the chemical fueled ferry
rocket, where they would be assembled at an orbital construction yard. At its
widest point, the nuclear electric ship would be five hundred feet across, and
it would carry a separate Mars landing vehicle along with it. At the bottom
of the ship's long central pillar is the nuclear reactor. By the process of
nuclear fission or splitting the atom, the reactor will generate a constant supply of
thermal energy. That heat will boil a reservoir of silicon oil into steam that
will travel up the central pipe and drive a turbine generator, which will convert
the rotational energy into electricity that will power the entire ship. The giant circular
panel at the top of the craft will function as a condenser that traps the
steam and cools it back to a liquid state so that it can be reused
in the atomic generator over and over again. The ship's main engine is located
halfway down the main pillar. It would have a platinum metal grid that would
be electrically charged with energy from the steam turbine. Then, vaporized particles of
the metallic ele cessium would be blown into the ultra hot grid, which would
ionize the cessium atoms and create an electrical field that blasted the atoms out into
space at high velocity. This will create thrust to move the space ship in
the opposite direction of the particle flow. It would be a relatively low amount
of thrust, but the efficiency of the electrical engine would allow it to continuously
operate for the entire duration of the flight. This is pretty much the same
way that modern ion thrusters operate on our existing space probes and satellites, So
credit to Stooling or for nailing the technology seventy years ago. At the top
of the ship, in the center of the condenser circle is the cargo space
and crew quarters for up to twenty passengers. Mounted on the front side of
the ion engine is the Mars landing craft. Once the main ship settles into
Mars orbit, the lander will release and fire its engine for a descent into
the Mars atmosphere. Here's another area where Stooling are improved on von Bron's design.
Instead of a glider, the Mars Lander will deploy a giant parachute.
This is a much more effective airbrake, but still not enough to land softly
in the Martian atmosphere, So before touchdown, the main rocket motors will fire
a landing burn just like a SpaceX Falcon nine, and slow the craft for
a safe landing. This combination of parachute and propulsive touchdown is the same method
that NASA used with their most recent Mars Lander. Once the landing party has
completed their surface exploration, they return to the lander and blast off in an
ascent module that is built into the top of the vehicle. This is essentially
the same method used by Apollo astronauts to lift off from the surface of the
Moon. Using the nuclear electric thruster, the journey to Mars would be much
longer than with a high thrust chemical burn. We're looking at thirteen months in
transit. It's going to take four months just to build up enough velocity to
escape Earth's gravity, then set even more months to reach Mars, and then
two months to slow down and settle into Mars orbit. Stullinger imagined that a
fleet of six nuclear ships would embark on this odyssey into deep space. And
again, at this time, no one was really sure what we might find
on the surface of Mars. There could be anything from low level vegetation to
lizards and insects, to the ruins of a long dead civilization. They had
no way to know for sure, but they were determined to find out by
sending people to the Red planet. Now Stillinger's technology was pretty sound, and
most of his plans still hold up in the modern day, the biggest flaw
being the extremely slow transit time of over one year just to arrive at Mars.
We know now that this is far too long to expose people to the
microgravity environment and cosmic radiation of outer space. So that was a problem,
but the ideas presented in Mars and Beyond were moving in the right direction.
Moving on to the nineteen sixties, and things are going spectacularly well at NASA's
human spaceflight program. Mercury and Gemini were successful at getting the first American into
space, reaching orbital velocity and conducting extra vehicular spacewalks. The Apollo program is
moving ahead at full steam, and our old pal Vernivon Bron is putting the
finishing touches on his Saturn five rocket that will power the first men to the
Moon and bring them home again. This is the high water mark for human
spaceflight, and NASA is already turning their attention to the next step beyond Apollo.
They want to send people to the planet Mars, and they want to
do it sometime in the early nineteen eighties. This led to a new wave
of Mars mission proposals. Everyone wanted in on the action. Even the Ford
Motor Company submitted their own proposal for a Mars transportation system. We are going
to focus specifically right now on a white paper from the Boeing Arrows Based division
in nineteen sixty eight. This is probably the most legitimate mission design coming from
a company that was already heavily involved in the spaceflight program and would continue to
be for decades to follow. What Boeing brought to the party was a design
for a nuclear thermal rocket propulsion stage. This is a much different beast to
the nuclear electric ion thruster that we talked about earlier. So we have the
same idea with the nuclear fission reactor, but instead of using the heat to
make steam and then using the steam to make electricity and all that, we
just take the red hot nuclear reactor core and pump liquid hydrogen fuel right into
it. At ultracold cryogenic temperatures, hydrogen is converted into a liquid state.
This densifies the atoms and creates a highly energetic propellant. Von Braun had just
figured out how to cryogenically liquefy both hydrogen and oxygen for the propulsion system of
his Saturn five. This unlocked signal efficantly more power than his previous hypergolic fuel
sources. Anyway, once this densified liquid hydrogen hits the super hot nuclear reactor,
it's going to rapidly expand back into a low density gas, which is
then channeled out through the engine nozzle as exhaust and creates thrust. So this
is like halfway in between a conventional rocket engine and an electric ion thruster,
providing an ideal combination of both thrust and efficiency. And this nuclear rocket technology
is something that NASA was already developing under Project Nerva. Boeing's interplanetary spacecraft concept
fixed the last major problem with sending a crew to Mars. According to their
calculation at the time, it would take less than two hundred days to reach
orbit around Mars. Getting back again would be a much lower process due to
the majority of propellant stages being used up on the outbound trip. We're still
looking at around six hundred days of total travel time, give or take a
few weeks depending on the year of the launch, but overall that's pretty good.
Much like the previous Mars ships we looked at, the Bowing interplanetary spacecraft
would need to be assembled in orbit, with the five nuclear propulsion modules being
so gigantic that each one would require a Saturn five rocket equipped with four additional
side boosters just to reach orbit. Like most rockets, the majority of this
structure is being taken up by engines and fuel tanks, so it's just the
very top section that contains the three crew modules. In the middle is the
mission module. This is the primary crew quarters for the journey to Mars and
back. It's a cylindrical pressure vessel that is divided into four decks and can
support a crew of six people. At the top of the stack is the
Mars Excursion Module. This vehicle has a descent stage for landing on Mars and
ascent stage for returning to the main ship. The Mars Excursion Module would support
a crew of three people for a thirty day exploration of the Martian surface.
At the bottom of the stack is the Earth Entry Module. This one is
only used to get the full crew of six people back down to Earth on
the very last day of the mission. It works just like every other Earth
re entry capsule, with a heat shield and a parachute system. So here's
the mission profile. Once the full vehicle is assembled and ready to go in
Earth orbit, it's going to fire up one massive departure burn from the first
stage engines. This consists of three nuclear propulsion modules burning in unison that's going
to provide all of the thrust required to reach Mars very quickly. Then on
approach to Mars, the rocket is going to flip around and fire up the
second stage, which is just a single nuclear propulsion module, and that is
going to provide the velocity change needed for an orbital insertion. From here,
the three person landing party transfers into the Mars Excursion module and separates from the
main vehicle. The excursion module has a main engine that will perform the de
orbit burn to bring it down through the Mars atmosphere, and at that point
it's going to deploy a main parachute that slows down as much as possible before
the descent stage engines fire up for the landing burn and soft touchdown. After
spending thirty days on Mars, the crew will leave the descent stage behind and
return in the ascent stage of the module. This uses four side boosters to
get off the ground, which are then separated, and the stage to ascend
engine takes the module into orbit to meet back up with the main ship.
Now all that's left is to fire up the final nuclear engine and perform a
departure burn to return to Earth. On arrival, the Earth entry module will
separate and come back down for a splash down landing in the ocean. So
that all sounds like a pretty solid plan. It would be a massive undertaking
and would be incredibly difficult to pull off. I mean five launches of the
gigantic and fully expendable Saturn five just to make one also fully expendable interplanetary spacecraft.
That's just a lot of resources to spend on one vehicle that may or
may not have succeeded. But everything we just went through should have at least
been possible even with nineteen seventies technology. So why did NASA never send people
to Mars? Well, it's complicated, there's no one answer. By the
early seventies, John F. Kennedy and his ambitious dreams for the future were
long dead. They even shot the guy's little brother. It was terrible.
The Democratic Party had been voted out and replaced with a Republican government. The
war in Vietnam was getting worse and worse, with no sign of an end.
The public had already lost much of their interest in space exploration, and
NASA was receiving a much smaller percentage of the federal budget. To work with.
So it came down to President Richard Nixon. He had two proposals sitting
on his desk, one to spanned the Apollo program to explore Mars, and
the other to develop the space Shuttle program. There was not enough money to do both