[X] My Assistant

[rogelio]

Would a manned trip to Venus or Mars have been possible in 1968?

I’ve wondered about this almost 40 years -- since the first moon landing (yes, I’m dating myself here). I hope that folks on this forum will pardon me since this is not a usual UMSF topic; but in my defense note that there have recently been threads on how long a suit-less astronaut would survive on Mars, and a a high-noon manned landing on Mercury....

Could the Saturn V/Apollo spacecraft have gotten a single astronaut to Venus or Mars? Of course this would have been a one-way, fast-flyby mission with no chance of landing (or return) and thus politically impossible.

The longest Apollo mission (no. 17) was 12.5 days in length, so we know that, at a minimum, a single astronaut could have survived 37 days, and NH recently crossed the orbit of Mars just over 100 days outbound from earth.

For “Apollo Venus/Mars”, assume that consumables and extra fuel would be stored in the service module and would substitute for the mass of the LM (16,000+ kg), and that one astronaut (not three) made the trip...

Anyway, just wondering whether a trip now projected for 2040 (at earliest) could have been made 70 years earlier...

[dvandorn]

Well, hmm... yes, for a one-way, suicide mission with no hope of either entering orbit at the destination or of return, then yes, it would have been possible.

But likely not in 1968.

You see, the CSM was only designed to last for about 14 days. We're not talking about consumables, like food and water, here. Or even electricity. The gaskets in the fuel lines were only good for about two weeks after you cracked the seals and let the hypergolic fuels flow, among other things.

The CSM was redesigned for long-term hibernation so that you could use it on Skylab flights, but that redesign wasn't completed until 1971 and the first flight vehicles capable of lasting more than two weeks weren't built until late 1971 and into 1972. And even then, theose CSMs were only "rated" for 90 days in flight.

Some additional work would have resulted in a CSM that could have lasted for 120 days or more, but it would have taken a little while to implement the needed design changes.

That's not your only issue, though. You can only store so much in the way of water (or liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the fuel cells to make into water), or like food, in a CSM. You can't store food in the SM, because it won't be available. There was no way to get anything other than liquids or gasses from the SM into the CM.

For the additional consumables your crewman would have needed, you'd have to build a special-purpose mission module that would take the place of the LM in the launch stack. That could be as heavy as the LM, but it would only contain food, water and life support consumables.

The mission module would likely take another year or two to design, test and fabricate.

So, the answer to your question is yes, Apollo and Saturn V technology could have delivered a single crewman to either Venus or Mars, on a fast flyby trajectory with no hope of return. But it probably wouldn't have been able to fly until 1970 or later, and that's assuming the need to do so had been identified, and given unlimited funds to accomplish, sometime in early to mid 1968.

-the other Doug