Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

The Mars Project - Wikipedia

Von Braun and his scientists, plus 100 V-2s, were shipped to the U.S. Army's rocket research facility at Fort Bliss in New Mexico. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_…

novel was not published, but the appendix formed the basis of a lecture von Braun gave at the First Symposium on Spaceflight held at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City in 1951.[1] The appendix was also published in a special edition of the German space flight journal

Weltraumfahrt in 1952, and later that year in hardback by Umschau Verlag in West Germany as Das Marsprojekt. It was translated into English by Henry J. White and published in the United States in 1953 by the University of Illinois Press as The Mars Project. Von Braun based his

Mars Project on the large Antarctic expeditions of the day. For example, Operation Highjump (1946–1947) was a United States Navy program that included 4,700 men, 13 ships and 23 aircraft. At the time, Antarctic explorers were cut off from the rest of the world and the necessary

skills had to be on hand to deal with any problem that arose. Von Braun expected the Martian explorers to face similar problems and included a large multi-disciplined crew in his mission, as well as multiple ships and landers for redundancy to reduce risk to personnel. In

1956 von Braun revised his Mars Plan and scaled down the size of the mission to two ships and 12 crew, requiring only 400 launches to launch the components and fuel to assemble in orbit. He published his results in a new book, The Exploration of Mars with co-author German-

American science writer and space advocate, Willy Ley. In 1954, Ley wrote Engineers' Dreams in which he discussed 'Seven Future Wonders of the World'. These included accurate predictions of the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France and commercial wind, solar and geothermal

power. Other schemes were less practical: damming the River Jordan to provide power and irrigation to Israel/Palestine and the plans of fellow German Herman Sörgel to drain the Mediterranean to link Europe with Africa and create the new continent of Atlantropa. He was a member

of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Sörgel was the originator of the idea of Atlantropa—a utopian continent created by damming the Strait of

Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Congo river. His idea called for the damming, and thus lowering, of the Mediterranean Sea level and then making use of the difference between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic sea levels to generate hydro-electric power. Sorgel's idea to

lower sea levels would increase the dry land areas around the Mediterranean and provide overland access to Africa. Damming the Congo river would refill the basin surrounding Lake Chad providing fresh water to irrigate the Sahara and shipping access to the African interior.

Besides creating new bodies of land, the mass amounts of hydro-electric energy that would be generating, could account for 50% of Europe's energy needs at the time. While Sörgel was dreaming up the idea, he never took into consideration how other countries would react or change.

The Levant would increase by 50%. Sörgel would also have to go through multiple Middle Eastern countries to get to Africa where most of the major changes would take place.