NASA's 'Inspirational' Mars Flyby 108
astroengine writes "The idea of slingshotting a manned spacecraft around Mars isn't a new one. In the 1960's, NASA carried out a feasibility study into an 800-day flyby mission to the Red Planet. And it would have been awesome. AT&T/Bellcomm mathematician A. A. VanderVeen was working for NASA in 1967 and came up with 5 possible launch opportunities between 1978 and 1986 — two windows in 1979 and 1983 provided the shortest transit time between the planets. But launch mass and fuel requirements were a constant issue. So VanderVeen turned to physics to find an elegant, and scientifically exciting, solution: add a Venus flyby to the Mars trip. Mars, Earth, and Venus align with the sun five times every 32 years, but Venus and Mars alignments happen more frequently making double (Earth-Venus-Mars-Earth) or even triple (Earth-Venus-Mars-Venus-Earth) flybys a viable mission. Unfortunately, the flyby never happened."
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the point of a manned ballistic fly-by? All the humans can do is operate some instruments for the brief period they're slingshotting around the planet.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the point of a manned ballistic fly-by?
Mmmm .. how about to test out technology that hasn't been tried before? That and the fact that landing and boosting off Mars would probably add an order of magnitude of complexity to the project.
As an aside, I was watching a doco on the moon landings recently and they mentioned that the lunar lander on the Apollo 10 mission (which was a full dress rehearsal for Apollo 11 and came with 8 nm of the lunar surface) was not fueled 100% so that Stafford and Cernan wouldn't be tempted to upstage Armstrong by landing on the moon ahead of him.
Re:800 days without any possibly of escape (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any "escape plan" built in ?
The Venus flyby plan allowed an abort in the first few days to return to Earth, but after that you were on your own. I presume the Mars flyby would be similar.
If you look back in history, few real voyages of exploration had an 'escape plan'. If you're not willing to lose a few crews, you shouldn't be sending them out there.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine it'd be like an Apollo 10 mission, a kind of dress rehersal for a future landing.
I think you mean Apollo 8 [wikipedia.org]
The key difference though is that Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 were testing the equipment that would land Apollo 11 on the moon. The Mars flyby seems to have been conceived as a one-off.
About launch mass (Score:5, Interesting)
I never completely understood the need of launching massive ships from Earth whenever we want to leave it. Whenever we wanted to travel the seas, we did not build a massive caravel inland then painstakingly dragged it all the way to the coast. We reasoned it made more sense to build it in a dry dock, that way it only requires a tiny push to get it into the ocean.
Wouldn't anyone at NASA think that making a "Space Dock" made sense?. Make a bunch of tiny trips to lower earth orbit and build the ship there, so you can make a larger ships to travel further. Mass would not be such a big issue (granted, fuel would be), but at least the escape velocity problem would be non-existent.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the point of a manned ballistic fly-by? All the humans can do is operate some instruments for the brief period they're slingshotting around the planet.
Why climb a mountain? What is the point? All you do once you get to the top is look around, and climb back down again.
Nobody should ever do something so utterly pointless as climb a mountain.
amiright?
Re:Flybys (Score:5, Interesting)
They made a very limited amount of sense when unmanned spacecraft were really dumb, but they make just about no sense today. At best you'd be testing deep space tech for human spaceflight, but you can test it about as well and much more safely in high Earth orbit.
You are totally correct. How utterly pointless a flyby is.
Im sure doing something for the fact that nobody in human history has ever done it before, being in the history books, the prestige and kudos that comes with it, im sure none of those things have ever had anything to do with human exploration. Im also sure the engineering and science advances that come out of a flyby like this also has nothing to do with it. Nor would be the information gathered from doing 90% of a Mars landing be of any use too.
amiright?
Re:About launch mass (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this is the internets and being a dick is sort of 'operators license' but that was a rather harsh reply to a question that isn't a bad one.
It's reasonable to ask why we're working on interplanetary manned flights, when one might suggest that it's a better investment of effort (and we gain valuable knowledge about long-term zero-g effects, space construction, and a host of lessons useful to long-duration space trips) to build spacedocks, ie spacecraft construction facilities near Earth.
Now, no, LEO is not a solution, but L5 would be.
The first voyage to the new world wasn't in a canoe (well, not on purpose anyway). We made that trip in large, long range vessels, compared to what we were used to sailing at the time.
We're PAST the canoe stage where you could push off from shore but needed to go right back. We've even sailed to and walked around on Iceland, to carry the analogy to its limits. But we won't usefully go further until we're building vessels that aren't an exercise in stuffing 3 dudes into a phone booth (ie Apollo) for days.
And (his fundamental point) is that it's STUPID to loft vessels of that size/scope/capability (or significant pieces thereof) out of our gravity well.
Personally, I see a natural intersection of emerging technologies in autonomous robotics, 3d printing, and (not quite there) mass-drivers pumping raw material from the Lunar surface to an assembly point at L5. Not sure why nobody seems to be talking about it.