Across the Space Frontier, Joseph Kaplan, Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Willey Ley, Oscar Schatchter, Fred Whipple, edited by Cornelius Ryan, Viking Press, 1952.
I have a copy from the second printing, June 1953
Across the Space Frontier, Joseph Kaplan, Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Willy Ley, Oscar Schatchter, Fred Whipple, edited by Cornelius Ryan, Viking Press, 1952. part of a prose exposition and elaboration of von Braun’s The Mars Project, the technical appendix of Project Mars,
Von Braun describes a lunar excursion, to be undertaken as a way to ease into interplanetary travel, and map the landing site for a lunar expedition.
Across the Space Frontier, Joseph Kaplan, Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Willey Ley, Oscar Schatchter, Fred Whipple, edited by Cornelius Ryan, Viking Press, 1952.
In a sense, this book is part of a prose exposition, and elaboration of von Braun’s The Mars Project, the technical appendix of Project Mars,
I have a copy from the second printing, June 1953
Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.
Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.
Space flight historian Michael J. Neufeld wrote an article about Wernher von Braun’s advocacy of space stations, Wernher von Braun’s Ultimate Weapon, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007.
An expanded version of that article appeared as ‘‘Space superiority’’: Wernher von Braun’s campaign for a nuclear-armed space station, 1946–1956 in a journal, Space Policy, 22 (2006) 52-62
The first workable proposal for a space program is apparently Wernher von Braun’s Project Mars. Project Mars is a work of fiction, but it lays out a space program that could probably take humans to Mars with the technology of 1955.
Project Mars didn’t see print until 2006, although it’s technical appendix was published as The Mars Project. in 1953.
In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.
I was wrong.
I’ve been reading science fiction for a long time, since maybe second grade, circa 1968. I believe that the first scifi book I read was Lester Del Rey’s Mission to the Moon.
