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_MarkG_* |
Jul 1 2006, 07:28 PM
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Guests |
QUOTE Why send such things, when you can use piles of rock and ice that Nature has provided? Assuming you can find piles of ice and rock in the orbits you want to use, of course. Provided you can put a few tens of thousands of tons of hardware into orbit even that isn't an issue. Find a small near-Earth asteroid, land a mass-driver and some kind of decent power plant -- be it nuclear or solar -- on the asteroid and your 'home' also becomes your fuel supply. It won't get anywhere fast, but by throwing the rock out the back of the mass-driver you can take it to orbit pretty much any planet in the solar system. Personally though I doubt people will ever land on another planet until they're doing it as a tourist trip. Venus is really kind of a no-hoper due to the atmosphere and surface conditions, where unmanned probes are clearly superior to humans (though obviously rovers controlled from orbit could move faster than rovers controlled from Earth), and while the Apollo astronauts probably achieved more in a few days in localised areas on the Moon than an unmanned probe would in months, for the cost of a manned trip to Mars with today's technology that could thorougly study one area you could 'pattern-bomb' Mars with a thousand or more unmanned rovers and get a good overview of the entire planet... I can't help but feel that the latter would be much better value for money. |
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