Talk:The Mars Project

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A fact from The Mars Project appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 10 March 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that The Mars Project, written by Wernher von Braun in 1948, has been regarded as "the most influential book" on manned missions to Mars (artist's conception pictured)?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2010/March.

Wikipedia

Genre[edit]

Pretty sure this is a fiction book. Does anyone find relabeling this book as fiction contentious? --FuturePrefect (talk) 23:39, 15 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

To me it's clear that this is a non-fiction book. The background is that in 1948 von Braun wrote a science fiction novel about a manned mission to Mars. It was only published in 2006 as Project Mars: A Technical Tale, but the novel's appendix, detailed engineering diagrams and calculations upon which he based the novel, was published in 1952 as Das Marsprojekt (translated to English in 1953 as The Mars Project). It's a proposed technical specification for a manned expedition to Mars, not a work of fiction. This NASA document calls The Mars Project an essay (p.16). What do others think? —Bruce1ee^talk 06:28, 16 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, but have you read it? Why don't you read the first few paragraphs, and then we can continue this conversation :) --FuturePrefect (talk) 00:33, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That download is von Braun's novel, Project Mars: A Technical Tale, and the Publisher's Introduction on page 5 is about the novel. This article is about The Mars Project, which is not the same thing. Read what I said above :) —Bruce1ee^talk 07:14, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Project Mars: A Technical Tale is von Braun's attempt at a science fiction story to fire the public's interest. Compared to other science fiction , at the time, it was poor, no US publisher would touch it. The technical appendix was so extraordinary that it caught attention in Germany was reworked and published there in 1952, then published in the USA as The Mars Project, 1953. aajacksoniv (talk) 14:51, 22 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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Elon[edit]

" Tweeting a picture of the non-fiction scientific book, Mr Li wrote: “Speaking about destiny, did you know that Von Braun's 1953 book ‘Mars Project,’ referenced a person named Elon that would bring humans to Mars? Pretty nuts.” " https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1432886/elon-musk-prediction-mars-wernher-von-braun-1953-spacex-ont

176.72.77.43 (talk) 02:55, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Elon comes from von Braun's novel Project Mars: A Technical Tale (written in the late 1940s, first published in 2006), and the suggestion that he may have predicted Elon Musk's space exploration ventures is mentioned here in the novel's article. —Bruce1ee^talk 06:00, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]