Fans of billionaire Elon Musk are now saying that a book written more than 70 years ago by the rocket scientist who helped put Huntsville on the map predicted the SpaceX and Tesla CEO becoming the leader of Mars.
A portion of the 1953 book “Mars Project” by aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who led development of rocket technology for the Nazi party in Germany and later developed rockets in Alabama.
In the book, von Braun says that “the government of Mars consisted of ten men.”
“At its head stood a man elected by the general population for five years, whom the Martians called ‘Elon’,” the text reads, according to an English translation released in 2006.
“The Elon and his cabinet were accountable to parliament, which enacted the laws by which the cabinet had to govern.”
Musk reposted the excerpt on X, saying: “How can this be real?”
Several commenters wrote that the text is proof that Musk is a time traveler, or that he is destined to rule Mars.
“No matter how often I tell people that I’m a 5000-year-old alien time traveler, they don’t believe me,” Musk responded to one commenter.
In September, Musk said that SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions by 2026, with the eventual goal of “building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.”
“Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet,” Musk posted.
America’s early efforts to reach the stars were boosted in no small part by von Braun.
In 1945, sensing defeat in World War II, von Braun and his team surrendered to the Allied forces and arrived in the U.S.
By 1950, von Braun was moved to Huntsville where he would continue to develop rockets for military application.
Within the decade he moved to the newly created NASA and was helping lift satellites into space, and plan for the historic moon landings. He helped start the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and developed the Saturn V rockets at the Marshall Space Flight Center to send missions to the moon.
He even had his own dreams of a mission to mars but died of cancer in 1977.
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