Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950-2000 (David S. F. Portree, NASA SP-2001-4521)

The story starts at White Sands in 1947 and 1948, where the interned Wernher von Braun wrote a novel about a Mars expedition. Portree quotes a history of the rocket team on how it turned out: 'an execrable manufacturer of plot and dialog.' The novel went unpublished. Its appendix of calculations came out in West Germany in 1952 and in English a year later as The Mars Project.

The expedition in that appendix is ten ships and 70 crew, assembled in orbit from 950 ferry-rocket flights that burn more than five million tons of propellant. Portree traces the scale to the large Antarctic expeditions of the 1940s, such as Operation High Jump with 4,000 men and 13 ships, where a party cut off from the world needed every specialist on hand. No robotic probes were expected to go first. The crew would land gliders on a polar ice cap, the one place von Braun thought certain to be smooth, and then walk 4,000 miles to a base site on the equator.

Portree notes that in 1952 von Braun called television from the Moon impractical, and that Armstrong's first steps were televised live sixteen years later. The monograph carries the Mars plans forward to 2000.