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I asked https://poe.com/chat/30oifcgb4s6niwihf5y

Could you remove the time stamps, and add punctuation and paragraphs to the below:

Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20th, 1969. It was a seminal event in human history, the first time that a human had stood on a celestial body other than the Earth. But even before Neil Armstrong’s “small step for man,” NASA was already planning its future based on the technology that had been developed for the Apollo program, and among those was a series of studies to send a manned mission around Mars.

Now, more than 50 years later, we are still far from our goal of sending humans to our planetary neighbors. But sometimes the most interesting history is the history of what might have been. NASA’s manned Mars mission plans of the 1960s deserve to be remembered.

In the foreword to a 2001 NASA monograph “Humans to Mars: 50 Years of Mission Planning,” NASA Chief Historian Robert D. Launius wrote that the planet Mars has long held a special fascination, even mythic status, for humans. While not the closest planet to Earth, scientists have considered it to be the planet that most closely resembles Earth and thus is the other planet in our solar system most likely to contain life.

Since before the Space Age began, people have wondered about the red planet and dreamed of exploring it. An early vision of the dream was written by Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the German rocket program. Von Braun had surrendered to the American Army in May 1945 and was brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, a U.S. effort to bring German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States.

From 1945 to 1950, Von Braun was interned at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico with about 60 other German rocket engineers spirited out of Nazi Germany by the U.S. Army at the end of the Second World War. In 1947 and 1948, to relieve boredom, Von Braun wrote a novel about an expedition to Mars. While the novel itself was awful and never saw publication, its appendix included details and mathematical proofs for the spacecraft and missions in the novel.

The appendix was published first in German in 1948 and then an English translation in 1950. In the foreword to the English translation, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine wrote that the “algorithm of space flight” laid out step-by-step in the outlines of Von Braun’s Mars project displayed the logic that 17 years later carried astronauts to the Moon.

Von Braun’s mission description was a product of the technology available at the time. He assumed that little automation would be available, so spacecraft driven by pilots would require substantial crews. He assumed limits in communication that meant that teams of scientists and technicians would have to come along. As such, the mission was large - 10 spacecraft and 70 crew. The components would be ferried to orbit first and assembled there.

But the pace of technology moved faster than he expected. As historian David S.F. Portree explains, it is interesting to compare Von Braun’s vision with the Apollo lunar expeditions, where just two astronauts landed on the Moon while an army of personnel, including scientists, formed part of each Apollo expedition but remained behind on Earth. This separation was made possible by communication advances that Von Braun did not anticipate.

Still, Von Braun offered a vision, saying that only a “miraculous insight” could have enabled the scientists of the 18th century to foresee the birth of electrical engineering in the 19th, and that would have required a revelation of equal inspiration for a scientist of the 19th century to foresee the nuclear power plants of the 20th. “No doubt the 21st century will hold equal surprises and more of them,” he wrote, “but not everything will be a surprise. It seems certain that the 21st century will be the century of scientific and commercial activities in outer space, of manned interplanetary flight, and the establishment of permanent human footholds outside the planet Earth.”

Von Braun’s vision was popularized in a series of articles in Collier’s magazine, and NASA held on to that vision. The first NASA proposal for a mission to Mars came in 1959. In April 1959, engineers at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland astonished a Senate committee by appealing for modest funds to study sending astronauts to Mars.

The study was funded, and Lewis produced a plan that would begin in orbit around the Earth and send an orbiter to Mars. A lander would detach and, after scientific study, return to the orbiter, which would then return to Earth. This was very similar to how Apollo launched to the Moon, but the fuel requirement for a trip to Mars would have been impractical. The Lewis proposal was to use nuclear thermal propulsion, with a nuclear reactor used to heat liquid hydrogen which would be expelled through a nozzle.

But politics intervened. In April 1961, the Soviets launched Vostok 1, carrying cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit, catching the U.S. behind in the space race. In response, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy said to a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.

The choice of priority was not random. NASA administrators had concluded that the moon mission was America’s most realistic opportunity to best the Soviet space program. JFK was defining the Space Race into a race that the U.S. might be able to win. Mars planners were torn over Kennedy’s new timetable. On the one hand, it put Mars work on the back burner by making the moon NASA’s primary, overriding goal. On the other hand, it promised to make launch vehicles and experience needed for Mars available all the sooner. The Apollo program and its technology would then rewrite the NASA plans for Mars.

Even before the MSFC engineers completed their “Empire” study in February 1965, other NASA centers sensed they might be left behind and began their own piloted flyby studies based on Apollo technology. If Mars was to be NASA’s target after the Moon, no NASA center wanted to be excluded. But the studies also occurred in the time of the Mariner missions, including Mariner 4, which did a flyby of Mars and returned pictures in July 1965. Mariner 4’s effects on NASA’s 1960s Mars plans cannot be overstated. In addition to finding a painfully thin atmosphere, it snapped 21 pictures of moonlike craters containing no signs of life, edible or otherwise. What’s more, it showed that robots could do flybys - no people were required.

While the host of studies were being conducted, NASA put together a joint Action Group to cull the best of the proposals. The new proposal envisioned flybys as preparation for a manned landing. But politics was intervening again. NASA administrator James Webb had been successful with Apollo by not offering any post-Apollo plans, which would have given ammunition to those who opposed the space program on financial grounds. When Webb stepped down and was replaced by Tom Paine in 1969, Paine was not as politically savvy and proposed high-budget Mars missions at a bad time to do so.

In 1967, Congress had warned that the Vietnam War’s costs dominated the federal budget and that it would tolerate no new undertakings. While President Nixon maintained support for NASA, he chose to direct efforts to near-Earth study and the space shuttle program instead of Mars. In 1971, NASA ceased all manned Mars flight planning. According to some old hands, mere mention of Mars within NASA became verboten. The barely affordable shuttle was a frequent target of attacks, so one can only imagine how people would react to Mars.

NASA was able to continue robotic missions, including the Viking program, which included an orbiter and a lander. But the manned flyby missions never happened. As historian David S.F. Portree notes, NASA had no shortage of dreams, but the story of spaceflight is told through the missions and programs that didn’t happen - “the great majority of them.” The Mars flyby missions became nearly forgotten history, remnants of a hidden space age whose ambition far exceeded that of the Moon program in the 1960s.

Today, more than 50 years on after those “Empire” missions would have been completed, we’re nowhere near putting a person on Mars. There is no NASA manned Mars mission in progress, and the general assumption is it couldn’t occur prior to the 2030s. Most of these were just studies - the detailed planning would have started as soon as a president backed a Mars mission. But of course, that never happened.