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What Hacker News says
- I think this book is "Project Mars - A Technical Tale" by Werner von Braun. It's cheaper on eBay, but not much. If you get a chance, read it. It's clearly of it's time, technically, but it definitely shows you a vision of what might have happened.
https://www.amazon.com/Project-MARS-Dr-Wernher-Braun/dp/0973...
- > Popularised by von Braun in his 1949 sci-fi novel, Project Mars
Von Braun's novel was written in 1949 but wasn't published until 2006. Perhaps the author means the technical appendix "The Mars Project" [0] which was published in 1952, which spawned a series of articles [1] in the popular magazine Collier's from 1952 to 1954.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon!
- And how do you think putting a man on the Moon sounded at a time when we'd yet to put a single person into space?
Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and viewed the Moon as little more than a step on the way to his vision of colonizing Mars, for which he'd already been working on technical plans with the planned first landings to be in the early 1980s. In fact this is precisely where the Space Shuttle, and to a lesser degree the ISS, came from. They were meant to be tools, with the ISS a very small scale version of the supporting stations planned to come with the Space Shuttle working as a beast of burden during their construction.
He retired from NASA once it became clear the politicians were no longer interested in space after winning the space race. As an amusing anecdote, well before he was the head of Apollo, he also wrote a sci-fi book, "Project Mars: A Technical Tale." In it there was an advanced civilization living on Mars headed by a group of ten individuals who were, themselves, headed by "The Elon."
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Those who lack the ability to think big will, unsurprisingly, never have anything big. Because there's no technological point where colonizing another planet, much like landing on the Moon, will ever be easy or simple. Because you're doing something that's never been done before which means there are a basically infinite number of things that might go wrong, and you simply cannot account for all of them. And this always has and always will be the same story. Technology doesn't simply come to us - we make it happen, and without pushing forward we will stagnate.
- So you are saying that Dr. Wernher von Braun's unpublished novel is still memorable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale...
- The name Elon comes from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
Written by a former nazi paperclip scientist
- Check this out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
A novel written by Werner Von Braun. Set on Mars. The ruler of Mars is "The Elon".
