Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000
| Author | David S. F. Portree |
|---|---|
| Published | February 2001 |
| Format | Book |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — A NASA History Division monograph tracing half a century of plans to send people to Mars, from von Braun’s 1950s armada to the 1990s Mars Direct and reference missions.
Published by the NASA History Division in February 2001 as Monographs in Aerospace History no. 21 (NASA SP-2001-4521). Portree, a space historian, walks through the major human Mars mission studies in order: Wernher von Braun’s early concepts, NASA’s first studies, the EMPIRE flyby studies of the early 1960s, the post-Apollo plans, the Viking era and the use of Martian resources, the “Case for Mars” conferences, the Space Exploration Initiative, and the 1990s design reference missions.
Each chapter summarises how the mission concepts, their mass and cost estimates, and the politics around them changed, making it a compact history of why the plans kept being made and deferred.
What it is: an official NASA history monograph, a reliable secondary history.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
- Original source: https://history.nasa.gov/monograph21.pdf
- Archived copy (Google Drive): Google Drive
151 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.