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 22 2005, 01:27 AM
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Guests |
The Niven story was "Becalmed In Hell", and he wrote it all the way back in (I believe) 1965. I don't remember any liquid nitrogen in that suit; what I do remember was that it was supposed to be only for emergency use because the joints tended to lock up after a fairly short time in that heat.
The story -- although it's often reprinted -- really was another demonstration (there were quite a few) of the fact that Niven, early in his career, was pretty much a scientific ignoramus. Consider: Venus is said to be pitch-black below the clouds (although, in that case, there's obviously no way the greenhouse effect could heat it up); they drop a "small probe" from the ship which is just an atmospheric probe (as if they wouldn't have done that countless times before dispatching a manned ship into the atmosphere); and there have been no unmanned surface landers before this expedition, with the result that our heroes are the very first to ever find out what Venus' surface actually looks like close up, or to obtain surface samples. Gaaakk! Amateur night. |
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Jul 28 2005, 06:21 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 21 2005, 08:27 PM) The Niven story was "Becalmed In Hell", and he wrote it all the way back in (I believe) 1965. I don't remember any liquid nitrogen in that suit; what I do remember was that it was supposed to be only for emergency use because the joints tended to lock up after a fairly short time in that heat. The story -- although it's often reprinted -- really was another demonstration (there were quite a few) of the fact that Niven, early in his career, was pretty much a scientific ignoramus. Consider: Venus is said to be pitch-black below the clouds (although, in that case, there's obviously no way the greenhouse effect could heat it up); they drop a "small probe" from the ship which is just an atmospheric probe (as if they wouldn't have done that countless times before dispatching a manned ship into the atmosphere); and there have been no unmanned surface landers before this expedition, with the result that our heroes are the very first to ever find out what Venus' surface actually looks like close up, or to obtain surface samples. Gaaakk! Amateur night. Venera 8 had reported rather dark skies in 1972, but at the time they didn't know it had landed when the Sun was only 5 degrees above the horizon. And I also recall that they considered the refraction at the surface to be so intense that theoretically one could look all the way around the planet. And one more - the original manned Mars missions of von Braun in the 1950s did not anticipate unmanned probes scouting the way to the Red Planet. The first closeups of the Red Planet would have been by ships full of men. And I mean just men. I presume the story also did not anticipate the concentrated sulfuric acid? You could always say it took place in an alternate universe where Venus wasn't quite as nasty as ours and space exploration involved few robot probes. -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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