Slashdot Mirror
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."
Are we there yet?
So help me, I will turn this spaceship around!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
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.
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?