NASA's 'Inspirational' Mars Flyby

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NASA's 'Inspirational' Mars Flyby

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 4, 2013 @11:01AM from the trip-that-almost-was dept.

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."

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Re:800 day mission by wonkey_monkey · 2013-03-04 11:28 · Score: 4, Funny

Are we there yet?
So help me, I will turn this spaceship around!

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systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Flybys by 0123456 · 2013-03-04 11:39 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
1. Re:Flybys by ThePeices · 2013-03-04 12:23 · 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:Why? by OzPeter · 2013-03-04 11:46 · Score: 4, 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.

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Re:800 days without any possibly of escape by 0123456 · 2013-03-04 11:47 · Score: 4, 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? by erice · 2013-03-04 12:04 · Score: 3, 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
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 by Edis+Krad · 2013-03-04 12:06 · 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.
1. Re:About launch mass by DerekLyons · 2013-03-04 13:40 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  I can't tell if you're actually that stupid or if you're pretending to be stupid to make a point. I mean seriously, you can't grasp the difference between a shipyard (dry dock) that you workers can walk to and needs no especial support - and LEO where everything comes with a launch price cost tagged onto it?
  
  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.
  No, space docks don't make any sense - they don't save you any money, in fact they cost you *more* because of the need to support your assembly on orbit. Mass is still a big issue because you have to pay to boost it. Escape velocity is still a problem, because you still need to boost the fuel to LEO and the mass of your spacecraft beyond LEO.
  
  Yes, eventually we're going to have to face the on-orbit assembly issue, but we're a long way from that. We're still in the 'canoe' phase - which you *can* build inland and carry to the water.
2. Re:About launch mass by FatLittleMonkey · 2013-03-04 13:58 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The problem is that working in space is hideously expensive. So that the cost of engineering out as much mass as possible to allow you to do everything in a single launch is, bizarrely, cheaper than launching a bunch of heavier-but-simpler-&-cheaper parts to assemble in orbit. For example, right now we can't even launch ship and fuel on separate rockets, which seems a pretty basic skill for a space-faring civilisation.
  As we do more in orbit, particularly as private companies actually start operating human-space-flight (even if it's just to provide in-orbit services for NASA/DOD/ESA/JAXA/CSA/etc), we should see techniques developed to make operations in space cheaper. At some point we'll reach the cross over where assembly is always cheaper than single-launch. After that, someone will inevitably start building a "space-dock".
  It's like reusable launchers. Logically, using a launch vehicle 100 times should be cheaper than using it once and throwing it away; look at aircraft, who would build a single-use plane? But so far we haven't been able to figure out how to make refurbishable craft cheaper than disposable ones.
  
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  Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
3. Re:About launch mass by argStyopa · 2013-03-05 00:52 · Score: 3, 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.
  
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  -Styopa
Re:Why? by ThePeices · 2013-03-04 12:18 · Score: 4, 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?