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."

Comments

About launch mass

[Edis Krad]

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:About launch mass

[DerekLyons]

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.

Re:Flybys

[ThePeices]

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?