Sometimes history throws up some strange coincidences.
Elon Musk, the famous CEO and co-founder of SpaceX, is well known for his passion to explore and send humans to Mars by 2024. He believes colonizing other planets is the only way to save life on Earth. Musk has even said he wants to be buried on Mars.
Here’s the weird part: back in the 1950s, a NASA rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun, who was a pioneer in promoting space exploration and building bases on the Moon and Mars, wrote a sci-fi novel that mentioned a person named “Elon” leading the mission to conquer the Red Planet.
Specifically, in his work The Mars Project, there’s a passage that says: “The government on Mars is run by 10 people, with the leader elected by popular vote every 5 years and called ‘Elon’. The two houses of Parliament are managed by Elon and his cabinet.”
“The Senate, called the Council of Elders, is limited to 60 members, each appointed for life by Elon when a seat becomes vacant.”
The title “Elon” seems to honor the leader of the Mars conquest, similar to how Western kings often called themselves Caesar.
Interestingly, this sci-fi book never reached the public at the time because 18 publishers rejected it. Von Braun later published parts of it in magazines to share his vision of Mars colonization. It wasn’t until 2006 that the full manuscript was finally published as a book titled Project Mars: A Technical Tale.
The book seemed forgotten until late last year when it resurfaced in a comment on one of Elon Musk’s tweets about destiny.
Musk tweeted: “Destiny, destiny. You can’t escape me.” A user named Toby Li replied: “Speaking of destiny, did you know Von Braun’s 1953 book ‘Mars Project’ mentioned a person named Elon leading humans to Mars? Crazy.”
This was actually first pointed out three years ago by a Reddit user u/sweetcuppingcakes who found the English manuscript of the book.
The original was written in German because Wernher von Braun was one of the Nazi Germany rocket scientists during World War II. After the war, he and many other German scientists moved to the US and worked on the country’s space program, eventually NASA.
Either way, this might just be one of many strange historical coincidences. The name Elon could come from the Hebrew word for “oak tree,” symbolizing wisdom. It’s impossible to know why von Braun chose that name since he died in 1977, six years after Musk was born.
