Sending Men To Venus |
Sending Men To Venus |
Jul 20 2005, 04:40 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 212 Joined: 19-July 05 Member No.: 442 |
While it is likely that future Venus missions will be robotic craft, at one point someone in NASA carried out an interesting contingency study on sending a manned craft to orbit Venus.
The file (Click here:Manned Venus Mission 1967) works on the assumption that either the NERVA project had been carried through to completion or that NASA had retained the capacity it was developing for Apollo. While the author does not rule out the possibility of a landing on Venus, he notes that owing to the unknown surface conditions they would be highly unlikely. Launch times are given as being between 1975-1986 and are designed to allow 40 days in orbit at Venus. As someone who was growing up during the period mentioned I would like to say that such missions would have been far more interesting than what actually occurred. |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jul 20 2005, 07:04 PM
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Guests |
Keep in mind that one of the main reasons for being hesitant to land men on Mars if we DO discover proof of either present or fossil life (which is virtually the only thing that could conceivably justify such a staggeringly expensive feat for at least the next 50 years) is that manned landers obviously cannot be sterilized -- which means that any attempt to use manned landers to study evidence of Martian life will disastrously contaminate the very thing they're trying to study. (I call "the Martian Catch-22.")
For this reason, it might be far more defensible to limit any manned Mars expeditions -- for a long time to come -- to orbiting the planet, so that the crew could teleoperate sophisticated sterilized surface rovers, sample-return landers, etc. without the lengthy radio time lag that makes it so extremely dificult to study any other planet by remote control directly from earth. But exactly that same kind of manned expedition -- a manned orbiter telecontrolling a large array of unmanned surface vehicles in a fast and efficient way -- could be used to explore Venus. So a manned Venus mission is not quite as crazy an idea as it might at first appear to be. |
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Jan 8 2008, 07:00 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
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