Disneyland 1957- Mars and Beyond.
Walt Disney began hosting his own television show in 1954 in an unusual contract: Disney provided a weekly hour-long television program in exchange for funding for the construction of Disneyland.
As a result, the television show was also originally named Disneyland. The anthology series has since gone through a number of name changes over the years: Walt Disney Presents, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, The Wonderful World of Disney, Disney’s Wonderful World, Walt Disney, The Disney Sunday Movie, and The Magical World of Disney. The series spanned an incredible 54 years—13 seasons of which were hosted by Walt Disney, himself.
The episode begins with an introduction of Walt Disney and his robot friend Garco, who provide a brief overview of this episode, which starts with a look at mankind seeking to understand his world, first noticing patterns in the stars. He develops beliefs regarding the celestial bodies. Theories from scientists and philosophers are discussed. Ptolemy’s inaccurate but formerly-accepted theories are discussed, as are those of Copernicus.
Life on other planets is considered, soon focusing on Mars. Ideas from science-fiction authors H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs are brought to life with colorful animation. Pulp science fiction comics of the time are parodied. Then the program adopts a serious tone as it profiles each of the planets in the solar system, from the perspective of what would happen to man on them.
The claim is that whereas most of the planets are either too cold or too hot for life as we know it, life on Mars could almost be normal, something that is of importance for the future. Dr. E.C. Slipher then discusses Mars and the possibility that life already exists there. More animation speculates what the conditions on Mars might be like. This section is filled with striking, inventive and decidedly atypical Disney animation.
The show wraps up with what a trip to Mars would entail for a space crew and its vessels. Contributor/spacecraft designer Ernst Stuhlinger presents his design and details regarding a unique umbrella-shaped MarsShip: the top portion is a revolving outer quarters ring providing artificial gravity for the crew of 20, under “parasol” coolant tubes. At the other end is a sodium-potassium reactor to provide power to the midsection electric/ion drive.
Attached upright is a chemically-fueled winged tail-lander. The mission shown involves six MarsShips, ultimately reaching 100,000 MPH, taking a 400-day spiral course to Mars where they would spend 412 days on the surface before returning.
Humans On Mars …Some Unusual and Plausible Plans
As every space enthusiast knows, we will land people on Mars within 20 years. Of course, we’ve been 20 years away from Mars for the last half-century. Between 1950 and 2000, NASA and various independent groups have come up with more than 1,000 detailed studies for manned Mars missions. Yet not a single one has come very close to fruition. At least on paper, Mars remains an eventual NASA goal, with their latest Curiosity rover seen in some ways as a precursor to human missions.
“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,” said the agency’s administrator Charles Bolden after the rover’s successful landing on Aug. 5.
Despite this, Mars is not really on the agency’s radar. After their Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) probe, set to launch in 2013, NASA has no concrete plans for the Red Planet. “Certainly, nobody’s really serious about sending people to Mars right now,” said historian David Portree, Wired Science’s resident spaceflight history expert and Beyond Apollo blogger.
There are still plenty of ideas out there, ranging from the extremely ambitious — such as Elon Musk’s desire to fly to the Red Planet in the next two decades – to the completely bizarre – like the MarsOne reality-show/one-way-suicide-mission combo.
Here we take a look at historical Mars plans, both crazy and sane, and the few that really stood a good chance at becoming reality.
The von Braun Paradigm
The rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun was one of the first people to come up with a detailed manned Mars mission based on sound science and engineering. Before he joined NASA, von Braun wrote a book called Das Marsprojekt, published in West Germany in 1952. In it, he envisioned a grandiose Mars exploration plan with ten 4,000-ton spaceships capable of taking 70 crewmembers to the Red Planet.
Once at Mars, several astronauts would descend to the surface on winged spacecraft that landed on skis at the Martian polar ice cap. They would then complete a 4,000-mile overland trek to the equator to build a basecamp and landing pad to allow the others to descend (at least you can’t accuse von Braun of thinking small!).
A scaled-down version of this epic mission famously appeared to American audiences in a series of articles between 1952 and 1954 in Collier’s magazine. The plans also served as part of the inspiration for Walt Disney’s 1957 ABC program Mars and Beyond, which you can see in the above video.
Though popularly known, these missions never had any serious support from a space agency and no one knows how much they would have cost. Von Braun estimated in Das Marsprojekt that fuel alone would come to $500 million – about $4 billion in today’s currency. They also suffered from a lack of knowledge about interplanetary space; von Braun’s spaceships heavily defended against micrometeoroids but not against radiation. And Mars’ atmosphere is now known to be far too thin to support the type of winged landers in his plans. Source: Wired Science
