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NASA's 'Inspirational' Mars Flyby
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."
Short answer: the ISS weighs 495 tons. That's a LOT of mass, and would take a lot of fuel, which itself would take even MORE fuel to get into orbit. A better compromise would probably be something like a small capsule with a habitat module, sort of like the Spacelab module for the shuttle.
Furthermore, the mission profile for a single launch to orbit ejection is much simpler than multiple launches, docking, building a spacecraft in orbit, and then orbit ejection.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Are we there yet?
So help me, I will turn this spaceship around!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
The problem with flybys is that they have most of the complexity of a real Mars mission but don't actually achieve much of anything. You have to survive in deep space for a year or more, but all you see of Mars is a fleeting glimpse over the course of a few hours as you zoom past. Venus is even worse, because there's really nothing to see other than clouds.
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.
All talks of "manned flight to Mars" centered around getting living human beings into a little confined spaced for hundreds of days
Even if every single thing works out - no one die on route, no accident, no nothing - it would still be an extremely cramped up place for human beings, and the psychological trauma of cooped up inside a holding cell for hundreds of days isn't something easy to deal with
But what if something goes wrong ?
What if one of the occupants die in route ?
What then ?
Is there any "escape plan" built in ?
How to deal with the rotting corpse ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The moon could be used to change the plane of the resulting solar orbit though.
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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.
Or just get it over with already and route the flight through Atlanta.