[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...