Sending Men To Venus Options

[gndonald]

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.

[Guest_MarkG_*]

And second, can human beings actually do any solid science on such a missions, that couldn't be done more cheaply by robots?

Yeah, I think that's the real issue. Unlesss you're going to send humans to live for a long period on the planet with the capability to travel widely and perform experiments along the way, odds are robots will do the same job for much less money.

[JRehling]

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