《The Mars Project》翻书笔记

作者：Wernher von Braun
出版社：University of Illinois Press
发行时间：October 1st 1962 (original public by 1953)
来源：下载的 pdf 版本
Goodreads：4.0（37 Ratings）

概要

The Mars Project is a technical specification for a manned expedition to Mars. It was written by von Braun in 1948 and was the first "technically comprehensive design" for such an expedition. The book has been described as "the most influential book on planning human missions to Mars".

作者介绍

Wernher von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German, later American, aerospace engineer, and space architect. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States.
In his twenties and early thirties, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and develop the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. Following the war, von Braun was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.

读后感

因为今天有 Falcon Heavy 的测试发射，所以想到这本书，就翻了一下，作者 Wernher von Braun 是纳粹的火箭项目负责人，回形针行动（二次世界大战末期，美国战略情报局把超过1600名的原纳粹德国科学家，工程师，和技师秘密引进到美国的一个行动）中排名第一的技术专家，后来到美国后主持土星5号的研发，成功地在1969年7月首次达成人类登陆月球

Wernher von Braun 可能是全人类中第一个仔细构想过如何探访火星的人，全书绝大部分都是技术细节、图表、示例图、公式，综合来看，本书不愧为「the most influential book on planning human missions to Mars」

将作者60多年前的设想和目前的情形对比：作者期待的核动力火箭还没有出现；很多潜在的问题已经被国际空间站的各种实验解决；为探访火星而需要的国际间大规模合作也没有出现，反而是 SpaceX 这样的企业目前在带头

摘录

The algorithm of spaceflight laid out step-by-step in the terse lines of Wernher von Braun's Mars Project displays the logic that seventeen years later carried astronauts to the Moon. Humans have always dreamed of travel to other worlds . The g real rocket pioneers-Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, Tsander, von Braun, Korolev, and others-were inspired by the prospect of interplanetary voyages . They sold (and oversold) other applications of rockets, but their real motivation was always spaceflight.
From boyhood, Wernher von Braun envisioned voyages to other worlds. He once told me that it was the gift of a telescope that turned his young eyes skyward and pointed his career toward the stars. As a teenager in pre-World War II Berlin, he joined a group of enthusiastic amateurs designing innovative systems and defining technical breakthroughs required for interplanetary flight. While pursuing his engineering education, he applied his expanding knowledge to the development of critical components for liquid fuel rockets. Recurring, spectacular explosions punctuated these pioneering experiments.
As war clouds gathered, the innovative young engineer was recruited by Captain Walter Dornberger, a thirly-five-year-old artillery officer ordered to build long-range military rockets in lieu of the aircraft prohibited to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Despite his youth, von Braun soon became the technical leader of the group and proposed moving the growing enterprise to Peenemünde, an island in the Baltic Sea where his father had hunted ducks.
The space age can be said to have begun on October 3, 1942, with the flight of von Braun's first A-4 (V-2) missile. This 46.1-foot-high, single-stage rocket with a 2,200-pound payload was propelled at 3,500 miles an hour for 200 miles by an alcohol-liquid oxygen engine capable of developing 56,000 pounds of thrust. V-2 bombardment of London was throttled by Allied armies invading Germany, but not until 1,054 rockets had struck England between September 8, 1944, and March 27, 1945 Meanwhile, von Braun survived fleets of Allied bombers that devastated the test complex; he also survived arrest by the Gestapo for defeatist statements about Germany's chances of winning the war Charged with advocating the building of interplanetary spacecraft instead of military weapons, he spent two weeks in a prison cell in Stetten in March 1944.
In February 1945, von Braun Fled Peenemünde ahead of the advancing Red Army He led his battered rocket team southwest with crates of rocket data; on May 2, 1945, they surrendered to advancing American troops near Reutte, Austria. Finding the German team remarkably cooperative, the U.S. Army transported 115 of the captured experts and 100 V-2s to New Mexico to continue rocket development and high-altitude research. Von Braun, like Moses, led his expatriates through the desert toward a distant promised land.
In the course of his subsequent experimental work, von Braun took a fresh look at interplanetary Flight based upon his rocket team's cumulative experience in Germany and the United States. Ten years after the first V-2 rocket Flight, he published his classic Das Marsprojekt in a special issue of the magazine Weltraumfahrt. This work also appeared in 1952 as a slim volume, Das Marsprojekt: Studie einer interplanetarischen Expedition, which was translated and published in 1953 as The Mars Project, which in turn stimulated a series of popular articles in Collier's magazine. Chesley Bonestell' s dramatic illustrations of future space shuttles, space stations, astronaut-tended space telescopes, and interplanetary spacecraft voyaging to Mars inspired a generation of young people to technical careers that could help make spaceflight a reality.
Von Braun's seventy-person Mars expedition included a fleet of forty-six space shuttles of 39-ton lift capacity (NASA's space shuttles lift 20 tons to orbit) . With a turnaround time of 10 days (NASA's shuttles require 75-125 days), these reusable vehicles could make 950 flights to orbit in eight months, allowing for six vehicles being continually out of service. This would require 5.32 million tons of fuel costing around $500 million, which von Braun equated to ten times the high-octane aviation gasoline burned in the six months of the Berlin airlift. The result would be ten fully fueled spaceships, each weighing 3,720 metric tons, ready to depart Earth's orbit in the plane of the ecliptic on a 260-day voyage to Mars.
While von Braun's team was working in the United States, Helmut Grottrup and his engineers were transferring V-2 technology to Soviet teams led by Sergei Korolev, Valentin Glushko, and others. Stalin was particularly impressed by Eugen Sanger and Irene Bredt' s plans for an antipodal bomber capable of attacking America; this conceptual design of an aerospace plane resembled a huge piloted V-2 with wings. He directed that the highest priority be given to intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) development and atomic bombs. New launch complexes were built at Kapustin Yar and Tyuratam to test increasingly powerful Soviet rockets. Impelled by technical advances and the intensifying cold war , ICBM development went into high gear in 1954 on both sides of the Iron Curtain . The resulting advances in rocketry led scientists organizing the International Geophysical Year (IGY) to propose that artificial satellites be launched in 1957
Moscow's response to the IGY proposal was the Commission for Interplanetary Tran sport (ICIC) within the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Led by the academician Leonid Sedov, ICIC' s bold mission was to develop robotic spacecraft for interplanetary flight . On July 29 and 30 , 1955 , both Washington and Moscow announced plans to launch satellites during the IGY The navy's Project Vanguard carried the banner for the United States, Sergei Korolev led the Soviet ICBM/Satellite launcher Program. The latter's team successfully flew the first R-7, Semyorka ("Good Old Number Seven"), two years later, on August 3, 1957
On October 4, a Soviet R-7 launched the 184-pound Sputnik into orbit. Americans were shocked by this spectacular achievement, but they should not have been; not only had Moscow announced its intentions, but von Braun's U.S. team had been ready to launch a small satellite since 1956 (its proposal was shelved in favor of the navy project). On November 3, Moscow celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in spectacular style by rocketing the 6-ton Sputnik II into orbit. The payload included an 1, 121-pound capsule with geophysical equipment, telemetry, and a life-support system for the canine cosmonaut Laiko, whose presence clearly presaged human spaceflight. In response to American charges that German experts were behind the Soviet achievements, Nikita Khrushchev smilingly pointed out that the United States had most of the experts and then asked why von Braun's team was not able to launch an American satellite.
A nationwide television audience watched the U.S. Navy 's heralded Vanguard rocket explode and collapse on the launch pad on December 6 . This embarrassing fiasco, after dazzling Soviet achievements, prompted Washing ton to give the eager von Braun and his team the green light to launch a satellite with their Jupiter Crocket. OnJanuary31 , 1958, America's 10.5-pound Explorer I soared into orbit with two micrometeoroid detectors, a Geiger counter, and telemetry. At less than l percent of the weight of Sputnik II, the miniaturized instruments on board nevertheless returned more valuable scientific information by discovering and mapping the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds Earth.
On the advice of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee, and after a thoughtful review of alternative courses, on April 14 the U.S. Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (S. 3609; H.R. 11881), this farsighted piece of legislation created the civilian NASA. America's fledgling space agency organized itself around the predecessor National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard team, and two groups transferred from the army : von Braun's Redstone Arsenal team at Huntsville, Alabama, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California . In the Soviet Union, rapid progress continued as new payloads weighing up to 6,500 pounds were launched. Khrushchev sneered that America would have to launch a lot of orange-sized sputniks to catch up.
On April 12, 1961, Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin blazed a human trail into orbit aboard Sergei Korolev's Vostok I ("The East"). His dramatic spaceflight captured the imagination of the world and called into question American technology and leadership . The Kennedy administration, smarting under Fidel Castro's success at the Bay of Pigs, resolved to gain the lead in space and explored three alternative programs to achieve this goal. An orbiting space station was rejected as too easily within Soviet capabilities, and an expedition to Mars was judged too difficult to accomplish with in a decade. A land ing on the Moon appeared to be an achievable project that would challenge NASA in all areas of spaceflight and establish America as the preeminent spacefaring nation.
The projected $20 billion cost of a lunar landing ($70 billion in 1990 dollars) would boost NASA's peak 1965 budget to 0.78 percent of the gross national product (GNP), but the alternative of surrendering space leadership appeared unthinkable . Four months after Gagarin 's flight, the Berlin Wall was erected, while Red Army tanks patrolled Eastern European capitals and the Soviet Union's shoe-pounding premier threatened at the United Nations to bury the West. Washington saw a threat to world peace from military adventurism by Kremlin leaders miscalculating the relative technological strengths of the superpowers . Although no American had yet flown in orbit, on May 25, 1961 , President Kennedy asked a cheering Congress to direct NASA to land astronauts on the Moon within the decade .
The national goal of a lunar landing within eight years challenged the U.S. aerospace enterprise across the entire spectrum of technologies . NASA administrator James E. Webb drew from government, industry, and university circles to create a superb management team that operated on a semiwartime footing . Ninety percent of the Apollo budget was spent outside the space agency as 400,000 Americans across the country were attracted to NASA's open program and inspiring goals.
Von Braun led Eberhardt Rees, Kurt Debus, and other key Peenemiinde engineers in a fast-paced project to develop the essential heavy-lift launch vehicle: a giant three-stage, 363-foot rocket called the Saturn V The first stage of this unprecedented booster developed 7.5 million pounds of thrust from five mighty F-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines burning 15 tons of fuel per second (the fuel pumps alone had greater horsepower than the turbines driving the new ocean liner Queen Elizabeth). The two liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen upper stages lifted 120 tons of payload into orbit for the 240,000-mile voyage to the Moon . NASA's conceptual systems design group adopted an innovative Lunar Orbit Rendezvous concept that substituted electronic docking prowess for brute rocket power A giant new launch complex was built at Cape Canaveral, a new manned spaceflight center was constructed at Houston, a worldwide tracking network was created, and new industrial and university research facilities were established across the country
As the end of the 1960s approached, precursor robotic missions were launched to characterize the lunar surface, and every spaceflight system and component was tested and retested. The impetus of Project Apollo's purposeful activities spurred many parallel developments, from Mariner spacecraft missions to Venus and Mars to the creation and spin-off of valuable global weather and communications satellite systems.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins flew the historic Apollo 11 mission that touched down on the lunar Sea of Tranquility-on time and within budget . Their footprints on the Moon's ancient surface record humanity's first steps toward a multi planet civilization . National jubilation and worldwide acclaim greeted America's triumph. By initiating human exploration of the Moon through NASA's open civilian space program, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and congressional leaders had made the United States the preeminent spacefaring nation. To von Braun, this achievement marked the next step in the evolution of life. He equated astronauts crossing space to explore the Moon to the first marine life learning to live on land. Apollo 11 was a boyhood dream come true, a beacon lighting the way to our future as a multiplanet species.
Because of his outstanding ability to envision the future, I asked von Braun to join me at NASA headquarters in Washington to help plan America's post-Apollo program. In 1969 President Nixon appointed a Space Task Group to explore manned spaceflight alternatives, including a large orbiting space station, continuing lunar exploration, and a long-range mission to Mars. Von Braun contributed to all these plans but none were pursued; the "Moon Race" was won, and national attention had turned elsewhere. The divisive Vietnam conflict made high-tech programs suspect, and science education came to be seen as elitist. With no future U.S. manned mission in prospect, Saturn Vproduction was terminated and the space program slumped back to a third of its 1960s peak. At the same time American universities experienced a steady decline in young people pursuing graduate work in science and technology.
Dissatisfied with NASA's aimlessness, in 1985 Congress created the Presidential National Commission on Space to look thirty years into the future and recommend long-range goals for America's civilian space program . The commission's final report, Pioneering the Space Frontier, proposed to the president and Congress a balanced, future-oriented program . The overarching recommendation was that America "lead the exploration and development of the space frontier, advancing science, technology and enterprise, and building institutions and systems that make accessible vast new resources and support human settlements beyond Earth's orbit, from the highlands of the Moon to the plains of Mars."
This was the goal anticipated by von Braun's classic Mars Project. On the twentieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, President Bush delivered a historic address at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Standing before the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh's 1927 Spirit of Saint Louis, and the 1969 spaceship Columbia in which Apollo 11 astronauts flew to the Moon, the president directed NASA to prepare plans for an orbiting space station, lunar research bases, and human exploration of Mars. The 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the new world will see that world setting sail for other new worlds across the ocean of space.
Von Braun watched the first humans explore the Moon, and he knew that among our children are the first explorers of Mars. As interplanetary travel becomes increasingly feasible and affordable in the twenty-first century, the expansion of life outward from its earthly cradle will become an enduring international goal. Space exploration and settlement will be accelerated by exponentially growing world economies, decreasing superpower confrontation, continuing advances in science and technology, and advancing spaceflight experience. Human intelligence is destined to activate the evolution of life on other worlds.
It is thus Fitting that I close with Wernher von Braun's clear vision of the next century.
Only a miraculous insight could have enabled the scientists of the eighteenth century to foresee the birth of electrical engineering in the nineteenth. It would have required a revelation of equal inspiration for a scientist of the nineteenth century to foresee the nuclear power plants of the twentieth. No doubt, the twenty-first century will hold equal surprises, and more of them. But not everything will be a surprise. It seems certain that the twenty-first century will be the century of scientific and commercial activities in outer space, of manned interplanetary flight, and the establishment of permanent human footholds outside the planet Earth.

The study will deal with a flotilla of ten space vessels manned by not less than 70 men. Each ship of the flotilla will be assembled in a two-hour orbital path around the earth, to which three-stage ferry rockets will deliver all the necessary components such as propellants, structures, and personnel. Once the vessels are assembled, fueled, and "in all respects ready for space," they will leave this "orbit of departure" and begin a voyage which will take them out of the earth's field of gravity and set them into an elliptical orbit around the sun.
At the maximum solar distance of this ellipse which is tangent to the Martian orbit, the ten vessels will be attracted by the gravitational field of Mars, and their rocket motors will decelerate them and swing them into a lunar orbit around Mars. In this they will remain without any thrust application until the return voyage to earth is begun.
Three of the vessels will be equipped with "landing boats" for descent to Mars's surface. Of these three boats, two will return to the circum-Martian orbit after shedding the wings which enabled them to use the Martian atmosphere for a glider landing. The landing party will be transshipped to the seven interplanetary vessels, together with the crews of the three which bore the landing boats and whatever Martian materials have been gathered. The two boats and the three ships which bore them will be abandoned in the circum-Martian orbit, and the entire personnel will return to the earth-orbit in the seven remaining interplanetary ships. From this orbit, the men will return to the earth 's surface by the upper stages of the same three stage ferry vessels which served to build and equip the space ships.

In 1492 Columbus knew less about the far Atlantic than we do about the heavens, yet he chose not to sail with a flotilla of less than three ships, and history tends to prove that he might never have returned to Spanish shores with his report of discoveries had he entrusted his fate to a single bottom. So it is with interplanetary exploration: it must be done on the grand scale. Great numbers of professionals from many walks of life, trained to co-operate unfailingly, must be recruited . Such training will require years before each can fit his special ability into the pattern of the whole. Aside from the design and construction of the actual space vessels, tons of rations, water, oxygen, instruments, surface vehicles and all sorts of expeditionary equipment will be required. The whole expeditionary personnel, together with the inanimate objects required for the fulfillment of their purpose, must be distributed throughout a flotilla of space vessels traveling in close formation, so that help may be available in case of trouble or malfunction of a single ship. The flotilla will coast for months on end along elliptical paths and will require intership visiting, necessitating the use of "space boats." Obviously an ample supply of spare parts and repair equipment cannot be omitted.

单词列表:

words	sentence
slide rule	The author did the work in his spare time and his sole computational tool was a slide rule
air drag	its reentry into the atmosphere and ensuing deceleration through air drag
touchdown	re-entry into the atmosphere to zero-speed touchdown on the Earth
solar flares	radiation hazard posed by cosmic rays, trapped radiation (Van Allen Belt), and solar flares
Atlantic	In 1492 Columbus knew less about the far Atlantic than we do about the heavens
walks of life	Great numbers of professionals from many walks of life
propellants	the use of chemical propellants would require such enormous masses of fuel
circum-tellurian	Space ships to reach the circum-Martian orbit and return from it to the circum-tellurian orbit.
nitric acid	landing craft are based on hydrazine (N,H,) and nitric acid (HNO,)
en route	ferry rockets en route to and from the orbit of departure
suffocate	and that they will not freeze to death, nor burn, nor suffocate
weightlessness	the effect of weightlessness which exists along all unpowered