Project Mars: A Technical Tale

Project Mars: A Technical Tale is the English translation of an unpublished German-language science fiction novel written by German-American rocket physicist Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) in 1949. Von Braun’s original title for the work was Marsprojekt. Henry J. White (1892–1962) translated it into English. In 2006, almost 30 years after von Braun’s death, Apogee Books (Canada) published White’s translation as Project Mars: A Technical Tale. As of 2025, the original German text remains unpublished. Set in the 1980s, the novel describes the first human mission to Mars and its encounter with benevolent Martians there. Although the novel was not published for 57 years, von Braun’s appendix to it, which gives technical specifications for an expedition to Mars, was published in English in 1953 by the University of Illinois Press as The Mars Project.