
A 1967 Proposal for Single-Launch Piloted Venus Flybys in 1972, 1973, and 1975 - sohkamyung
https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2017/05/apollo-ends-at-venus-1967-proposal-for.html
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ethbro
_" Six months after Funk and Taylor completed their report, AAP bore the brunt
of more than $500 million in Congressional cuts to NASA's Fiscal Year 1968
budget. The program, which for a time in 1966 had been planned to include some
40 Earth-orbital and lunar missions, shrank rapidly during 1968-1969. It was
officially renamed the Skylab Program in February 1970. Between May 1973 and
February 1974, three three-man crews occupied the Skylab Orbital Workshop in
Earth orbit for a total of 173 days."_

For context, the US spent ~$110B (non-inflation adjusted) on military actions
in Vietnam, 1965-72.

To think we could have ceded Vietnam a few years earlier and visited Venus for
pocket change (and potentially not had Nixon as a president)... the mind
boggles.

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interfixus
But then, the whole cold war madness, of which the Vietnam debacle was one
sorry outgrowth, was the very thing that fueled the space race.

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Certhas
Neal Stephenson explores this point here:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.html)

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mabbo
In a sense, it may have been a good thing we didn't attempt a manned Venus
fly-by in the 70s. Even today, we aren't sure we can sufficiently shield
spacecraft from radiation outside of the earth's magnetosphere.

Imagine the public perception of NASA had every astronaut that went to Venus
come home and slowly died of multiple cancers.

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Robotbeat
Meh, radiation concern is over-rated. Astronauts and cosmonauts have spent
more than a year in orbit, and the longest cumulative time in space (for one
person) is over 800 days. YES, this is LEO, where the radiation levels are
lower, but the levels of radiation aren't actually that much higher once you
minus out the relatively-easily-shielded solar particle radiation. It's about
a factor of 2 higher in deep space vs LEO. So as far as cumulative dose, we've
already achieved that without "slowly dying of multiple cancers." And really,
it takes a lot more cumulative dose than that to have a large and
statistically meaningful cancer risk increase. We're talking about a 3% risk
of cancer death, not 90% as you're implying (and the risk is relatively
linear).

The nice thing about Venus flyby is that provided you can shield the solar
radiation (using water and supplies), the interplanetary magnetic field is
stronger the closer to the Sun you get, so the very difficult-to-shield cosmic
ray dose actually reduces.

And another note about deep space radiation: there's an incorrect assumption
out there that you do not receive the highest energy cosmic ray radiation in
LEO due to the Earth's magnetic field. That's not true. The Earth's magnetic
field can only shield the lower energy cosmic rays (the ones that are easier
to shield using supplies and spacecraft mass). The highest energy cosmic rays,
above the "geomagnetic cutoff," still get through, and they're the hardest to
shield and also the ones that people say the effects are least known. However,
we've had dozens of astronauts & cosmonauts spend ~6 month stints in space
with exposure to these rays without any dramatic effects (and some have spent
a year or more at a time).

I'd venture that a crewed Venus flyby ("ma'ammed" as well as manned, since
this is Venus afterall!!!) in the 1970s was perfectly doable from this
perspective, given enough supplies and basic shielding from solar particle
events. It would've been risky, but perhaps no more risky than Apollo 11,
which had to actually land on and launch from a rocky body (a huge extra
source of risk).

Skylab had a >80 day mission in the 1970s, and the Soviets did a >175 day
mission in 1979. I think a Venus flyby in the 70s would've been feasible.

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scrumper
Isn't the problem more those occasional solar flares than steady-state cosmic
radiation? All longterm spaceflight so far has been inside the van Allen belts
which offer quite a bit of protection (for us on earth too).

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Robotbeat
The solar flares' radiation is relatively easy to shield against. You can
arrange your food and water supplies to provide temporary shielding. Even a
very small amount of shielding (like simply being inside a spacecraft) will
stop the worst effects. Here's a graph showing some really bad solar flares
and how aluminum (which is a terrible shielding material compared to food and
water) reduces the dose: [http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/content-
slides/space-life-...](http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/content-slides/space-
life-sciences/radiation-effects/?pageaction=displaySlideDetails&tk=56&dpg=13)

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scrumper
OK interesting, thanks for sharing.

Shielding in general does seem to be a real issue for any spaceflight beyond
LEO though; perhaps not as bad as I'd thought.

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interfixus
I remember dismissing the Capricorn One movie out of hand for positing a
manned Mars program with _Apollo_ gear. Maybe I was a bit too harsh there,
preposterous as the plotline otherwise was.

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eDISCO
I was just wondering if we had technology available at that time for a self-
sustaining mission that could last 350+ days, while supporting the crew of 3
(or 2?) and fitting the weight limits...

