Empire: Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions Part I: Aeronutronic and General Dynamics Studies

F. I. Ordway et al. (1993), JBIS, 46, pp.179-190

Refcode: 1993.46.179

Abstract:

During the early 1950s, Wernher von Braun described a proposed manned expedition to Mars in both the technical and popular literature (1,2,3,4,5). His plan called for a flotilla of 10 spaceships manned by at least 70 men. “Each ship,” he explained, “will be assembled in a two-hour orbital path around the Earth to which three-stage fen-y rockets will deliver all the necessary components such as propellants, structures, and personnel. Once the vessels are assembled, fuelled, and ‘in all respects ready for space’, they will leave this ‘orbit of departure ‘ and begin a voyage that will take them out of the Earth’s field of gravity and set them into an elliptical orbit around the Sun”. His spaceships were to be powered by chemical propellants, which, from the perspective of the early 1950s, offered the only feasible means of traversing interplanetary distances.