A brief history of Musk, Mars and Moonraker

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I wonder how people at NASA feel about being at the mercy of Elon Musk. Are they nostalgic about the good old days when Hitler’s rocket engineers helped them put Neil Armstrong on the moon? Being used to government work, the German Freiherr (Baron) Wernher von Braun and his teammates turned out to be just as loyal to the administrations of JFK, LBJ and Richard Nixon as they had been to the Third Reich. And ironically, unlike the current owner of X, the Nazi rocketeers stayed away from retweeting antisemitic conspiracy theories and didn’t swoon over aspiring dictators with a sweet spot for well-armed golfers — at least not publicly.

But just like Musk, they were very keen on going to Mars. On Aug. 4, 1969 — only two weeks after NASA had met JFK’s deadline for the moon landing (“before the decade is out”) — von Braun presented a detailed plan for a manned expedition to Mars with a precise launch date: Nov. 12, 1981. Had they gotten the funds they asked for, I am sure they would have met that deadline, too. At least that’s what I thought in 1969 after watching the breathtakingly successful space missions from Apollo 7 to 11. In my defense, I was only 10 years old and convinced that by 1981 I’d be an astronaut myself.

I was wrong on all accounts. Money for space adventures dried up as the Vietnam War dragged on, von Braun lost his magic with congressmen who held the purse strings and I went to pharmacy school instead of joining the Space Academy.

The only piece of hardware from the ambitious Mars proposal that survived Nixon’s ferocious spending cuts was a small, reusable vehicle that was supposed to commute between Florida and low Earth orbit. Von Braun’s flying delivery truck later morphed into the Space Shuttle, which fell crushingly short of “boldly going where no man has gone before.” Except for a brief moment in 1979 when Roger Moore was flying a shuttle named Moonraker and attempted re-entry with a Bond girl in zero gravity.

The Space Shuttle not only annoyed space buffs and “Star Trek” aficionados who found it uninspiring, but also Minnesota’s very own Sen. Walter Mondale, who called it “ridiculous and not worth the money.” After all, his constituents were Midwest dairy farmers, not Milky Way travelers.

The first real shuttle didn’t take off until 1981 and looked exactly like the movie prop in Moonraker. By that time von Braun was already dead. He died in 1977. As far as we know, he never had his sperm frozen with the intent to populate other planets and spread the charm of German nobility throughout the solar system.

Musk, on the other hand, has done just that — freezing sperm, not spreading charm — and hopes to be even more prolific on Mars in the future than he has been on Earth in the recent past through the more traditional, in-person route of multiplying. This, too, is ironic, since having fantasies about breeding programs for a new white master race is something you would expect from a former SS member like von Braun but not an immigrant from South Africa like Musk. Wait, what? South Africa? Maybe it isn’t so terribly ironic after all. Who is behaving like Dr. Strangelove now?

And depending on how things go on Nov. 5, Elon Musk, just like Wernher von Braun, might find himself hired as a government employee. Unfortunately, this time it won’t be the Kennedy administration. I guess we need Ian Fleming to come up with a happy end to that plot.

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter (X) handle is @HenningSchroed1.