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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Jun 30 2006, 08:08 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
Don, I must say that, with your clarifications, I agree with you much more than I don't.
This thread is good, I think -- though there is a definite self-limiting factor to a manned Venus orbiter right now (energetic cosmic rays and solar flares, with no really good way to shield against them). To safely operate manned vehicles at Venus, I think you'd first need to maneuver an asteroid into orbit around it and dig your manned vehicle into that asteroid. (Unlike Mars, Venus doesn't present us with a ready-made natural piece of real estate in the right location.) I somehow get a feeling that, by the time we know enough to be able to maneuver asteroids into planetary orbits, we'll have come up with a shielding solution for energetic particles... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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