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 30 2005, 01:30 AM
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Guests |
Oh, yes, the Niven story didn't mention the possibility of super-refraction producing a "bowl-shaped" surface on Venus -- buit then, that idea, which became briefly faddish in early 1970s SF (one of John Varley's first stories was "In the Bowl") turned out to be totally wrong as soon as the Soviets landed cameras. Indeed, it seems to be extremely hard to predict in advance the way an atmospheric planet's sky will look to a landed spacecraft; the various possible optical properties involved are just too complex, and very slight variations in them seem to have effects too great.
As for Venus' H2SO4 clouds: nobody seems to have guessed that one in advance before Earth-based studies nailed them in 1973 -- the closest anyone had come before was hydrochloric acid. So Niven can hardly be blamed for missing those possibilities -- but he CAN be hammered, in no uncetain terms, for his portrayal of Venus as pitch-black below the clouds and his prediction that no unmanned landers would touch down before his crew did. Both those items, as I said, were violations of elementary scientific common sense, not subtle misses. (It's true that huge numbers of science writers had a strange blind spot in the early 1950s about unmanned probes showing us the vistas of new worlds before humans got there -- that turns up, in regard to the Moon's farside, in an Arthur C. Clarke story as late as 1957! Maybe they didn't want to believe it. But by 1965 there was no conceivable excuse even by that standard. Indeed, by 1963 Andre Norton -- not exactly the most scientifically reliable SF writer -- was writing about unmanned "peeper probes" being used to explore the past via time machine.) |
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