Human mission to Mars a similar mission in English in the book "The Conquest of Space" (1949), featuring illustrations by Chesley Bonestell. Von Braun's Mars project envisioned nearly a thousand three-stage vehicles launching from Earth to ferry parts for the Mars mission to be constructed at a space station in Earth orbit. The mission itself featured a fleet of ten spacecraft with a combined crew of 70 heading to Mars, bringing three winged surface excursion ships that would land horizontally on the surface of Mars. (Winged landing was considered possible because at the time of his proposal, the Martian atmosphere was believed to be
A Princess of Mars the planetary romance had become very popular in the emerging science fiction pulp magazines. The novel can also be classified as the closely related genre sword and planet, which consists of what are essentially sword and sorcery stories that take place on another planet. "A Princess of Mars" is widely considered to be the archetypal novel of the sword and planet genre. The novel also shares a number of elements of Westerns, such as desert settings, women taken captive, and a climactic life-or-death confrontation with the antagonist. Burroughs employs a literary device for "A Princess of Mars" to which he