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, 06:39 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 154 Joined: 17-March 05 Member No.: 206 |
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jul 21 2005, 09:27 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. Well, remember that in 1965, our knowledge of the surface of Venus was very limited. Niven may have been only writting according to the latest information at that time, so I wouldn't call him an ignoramus! Now if we could just get Ringworld to be stable |
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Jul 29 2005, 03:37 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
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Jul 29 2005, 04:10 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
QUOTE (JRehling @ Jul 29 2005, 10:37 AM) I feel the need to share this: I started fourth grade in 1978 -- the same year that Pioneer Venus arrived at Venus, and during that year, artists renditions of what would later be dubbed Devana Chasma appeared in our newspaper. Of course, it had been known for over a decade that the surface of Venus was very hot. However, my school district's funding being what it was, we had some significantly outdated materials in the classroom. I was participating in a self-graded exercise that began with my reading a short essay on the possibility of life on Venus, and this essay being from the early Sixties, it took a basic "Nobody knows" stance. When I answered the questions at the end, and one of them flatly asked if there was life on the surface of Venus, I drew upon the slightly-updated facts and said, "No." Then, in the self-grading phase, I would have been required to give myself an incorrect for that answer because the favored answer (in the early Sixties) was "Nobody knows". I stepped up to the teacher to ask her to make a ruling, and I ended up getting proper credit for my answer. Circa 1995 I attended a friend's son's elementary school science fair in the Boston area. One child had an display on Earth's Moon and was using a book from 1963! The page he had it open to was the one about the three old scenarios of how Luna was formed (this was well before the impact theory). I politely tried to explain to him about the new idea and that the book was rather outdated. He understood and accepted what I was saying, but it was also obvious that he couldn't just run off and make a new display. I was amazed that no parent or teacher cuaght this - but maybe I shouldn't be. And then I encountered another display with an older student girl who had an outdated model of the Solar System. Somehow I got on the subject of other solar systems and extraterrestrial life with her, neither of which she somehow had even considered before. And this was not some rundown school in the middle of nowhere! -------------------- "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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