The Mars Project

Rating:
Summary: A book for the true space junkie.
Review: Do you wonder how they did it? How they actually figured out how to get to the moon? Well, this is Von Braun's plan for getting to mars using the technologies available in the early 1950's and it shows the detailed thinking necessary to figure out how to make it all work. Lots of math and diagrams. My vote for the best book of the century. To give you some idea, I already own this book, a 1962 edition. It is getting too precious to thumb through.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic!
Review: This book is a real classic. You will see how rocket wizzard and space visionary Wernher von Braun and his colleagues imagined a manned mission to Mars with the technology available in the mid 20th century. With today's knowledge and financial horizon, von Braun's vision looks pretty oversized, and the surface of Mars certainly is very different from what they believed 50 years ago. The very value of this book is that it simply showed how such an extensive mission could be made feasible -- that it is possible to send people to Mars without fancy technology of science fiction writers. The authors use some calculus and diagrams to explain the complicated flight dynamics for sending a spacecraft to another planet and landing on its surface.
Today we know that a mission to Mars will not look like von Braun's "Mars Project" but it is good to know that most of the basics haven't changed. Buy this book together with Robert Zubrin's "Case for Mars" and you'll see the progress within half a century.