As I’ve recently posted elsewhere:
The back story here, as related by the publisher, is that von Braun wrote this novel (in German) in his postwar spare time after he was picked up by Operation Paperclip.
His plan was to promote the idea of interplanetary travel by means of the novel, which included a massive technical appendix illustrating the engineering behind the story in the novel.
He was unable to interest any German-language publishers in the novel.
The technical appendix served as the basis for his now-legendary lecture at the First Symposium on Spaceflight at the Hayden Planetarium in 1951.
(Which resulted in “The Great 1952 Space Program That Almost Was” which enthralled Collier’s magazine readers and inspired a generation of space visionaries.)
A couple of years later, the technical appendix was published by itself, first in German, as Das Marsprojekt, then in English translation, as The Mars Project, in 1953.
The German-language manuscript remained in von Braun’s personal papers at Huntsville, where it was latterly found, translated to English, and published by Apogee books.
Apogee’s first edition was published in 2006. I picked up a copy at the Apogee dealers’ table at LACon IV that year.
SpaceX was founded in 2002.
So, as much as I’d like to believe in this little cosmic coincidence, I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t a little publisher’s in-joke.
I’d love to see the original German manuscript.
(Anyone near enough Huntsville to go take a look?)
