As Proposed by Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley

We have re-iterated again and again the major limitation facing the project of the first flight to Mars, as proposed by Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley in 1956: the low total impulse of the fuels they chose: Nitric Acid and Hydrazine. In fact, this consideration dominated all other engineering considerations. Every "power maneuver" was dedicated to starting and ending in locations that would yield at the very least the minimum required velocity change that would suffice. Likewise, the fractional solar orbit to Mars was dedicated to the same proposition: the use of the least amount of fuel to bring the ships into congruence with the orbit of Mars at the correct time; the amount of time to accomplish this had to be a secondary consideration.

The fractional orbit of the ships to Mars required the least energy requirement necessary for all maneuvers, and assumed the starting positions of the planets in the required positions in order to accomplish this very low energy requirement to accomplish the trip.

It is a singularly curious and extraordinary fact that the "capture maneuvers" for both the proposed expedition to Mars, and the earlier proposed expedition to the Moon (a great, wonderfully grandiose proposal by Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley for sending 50 men to the moon in three colossal space ships), proposed orbital "capture maneuvers" and "landing maneuvers" that would nowadays be considered unacceptable (particularly in the case of the Lunar expedition; the landing maneuver offered no way to save the ships if the engines did not start during the descent, unlike project Apollo).

The Very Problematical Landing on Mars

In the 1950s, it was routine procedure to land rocket powered airplanes which had exhausted their rocket propellent as gliders, on the dry desert sands at the Muroc dry desert lake in New Mexico. So naturally, planners for a landing on another planet, especially a "desert" planet such as Mars, would think of this as the natural, logical way to land a space craft on the planet's surface.

Now, the thinking at the time was that Mars was a "desert planet"; naturally, the planners of an interplanetary expedition to Mars would tend to think of the best way to land on Mars as the method they only had experience with: gliding down in a vehicle with wings, and landing on skids, on desert sands, at relatively high speeds. By 1956, they'd accumulated experience with the first generation X-1 rocket plane (and the X-2 and X-2B, and the Douglas "Skyrocket"); the X-15, which would reveal, with a vengeance, the difficulties of this kind of landing, still lay in the future; nevertheless, they had enough accidents to suggest to them that this kind of landing was at least "risky".

But this was the only way they knew a rocket powered vehicle could land. So they planned it for the Mars Expedition of 1956.

The planners of the landing knew that the atmosphere of Mars was very thin, and that the lander would need wings of HUGE AREA, in order to keep the stalling (landing speed) of the vehicle "relatively" slow. Let us examine the almost "cartoonish" figures of the lander, its wing loading in particular.

The giant wings of this glider (which contained both the ascent stage and its required fuel, and the supplies for the stay on Mars for slightly over a year) have an area of 24,500 square feet! Even so, in the thin Martian air, this means a stalling speed (landing speed) of 120 miles per hour! On earth, this low wing loading would yield a gentle landing speed of only 60 miles per hour. One depiction of the giant landing vehicle shows a swept wing design, not unlike the B2 stealth bomber, with its ascent stage for returning the crew to Martian orbit (there are a number of defects with the design as popularly depicted; the aeronautical engineers would surely have avoided these when they designed the landing vehicle.)

The 1956 Mars Expedition Proposed by Von Braun and Ley [AH&T 3]

Part 1: Mission Introduction
Part 1: Mars Departure: 10,075 Miles Above Earth
Part 1: Power Maneuver for Martian Orbit