The bright planet Venus appears in conjunction with the Pleiades star cluster, Friday, April 3, 2020, as seen from Olympia, Wash. The extra-close grouping of the planet with the star cluster commonly known as the “seven sisters” occurs approximately every eight years. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) One of the subplots of the recently concluded first season of Apple TV’s “Star City” — the spinoff of the alternate history television series “For All Mankind” — concerns a Soviet-crewed flyby of Venus taking place in the early 1970s. The mission is fraught with Cold War intrigue and Soviet-era paranoia and corruption.
However, many people do not know that NASA seriously considered a similar space mission during the same timeframe.
It was part of the Apollo Applications Program, which studied concepts for space missions using Apollo/Saturn hardware, ranging from extended lunar stays to crewed orbiting space stations. NASA conducted studies for such missions even before the Apollo 11 moon landing took place.
One of the concepts, a Venus flyby mission, would have been a bold undertaking indeed, considering the technology available at the time and the lack of research on the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body.
A company called Bellcomm, which was a subsidiary of Bell Labs in the 1960s, conducted the study for the Venus flyby on NASA’s behalf. Kirk Sorenson, a nuclear and aerospace engineer, provided a summary of the study’s conclusions in the Selenian Boondocks blog.
The concept would have involved launching an Apollo capsule with a Saturn V rocket into low Earth orbit. Instead of a lunar module, the Environmental Support Module for the long voyage would have been included, containing equipment and consumables for the long voyage.
The third stage of the Saturn — the S-IVB — would have blasted the Apollo capsule and the equipment module into the Venus flyby trajectory. Any fuel left over would have been vented into space.
The astronauts would have used the contents of the environmental support module to outfit one of the fuel tanks into living space. The concept was called the “wet workshop.” The S-IVB would also have solar panels to provide power for the mission.
According to Paul Drye, a space historian who has written about space missions that never were in his False Steps blog, the astronauts would spend 123 days en route to Venus. The spacecraft would pass around the day side of the planet at a distance of 6,200 kilometers before spending 273 days to return to Earth for a total mission elapsed time of 396 days.
While the spacecraft was at its closest approach to Venus, it would scan the surface with radar as well as conduct spectroscopic and photographic studies. The spacecraft would also launch an orbiter along with 14 probes that would enter Venus’ atmosphere.
These include “six atmospheric probes” dropped at six different locations to “determine how Venus’ atmosphere increased in density the closer one got to the surface,” “four meteorological balloon probes” for studying the atmosphere and “smaller-scale winds,” a duo of “crash-landing” probes for surface photographs during landing, and “two soft-landers” that will “take surface photographs, examine the soil, and measure Venusian weather.”
The Apollo command module would use an augmented heat shield to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere at the conclusion of the voyage.
The Venus flyby mission proposal was stillborn. Even before the Apollo 11 moon landing, Congress began to cut NASA’s budget. The last three Apollo missions were cancelled. The only proposal under the Apollo Applications project that became reality was Skylab, America’s first space station that hosted three missions of three crewmen each in 1973 and 1974.
NASA, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency and Japan have sent a number of uncrewed missions to Venus, with some, like NASA’s Veritas, in development. Their findings have unveiled a hellish world with a surface atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth’s and a surface temperature approaching 880 degrees Fahrenheit.
The world’s space agencies and the new commercial space companies are concentrating on the moon and Mars as deep space destinations for astronauts. Still, could a crewed Venus flyby mission be undertaken using current or soon-to-be developed technology?
A SpaceX Starship might be outfitted with a crew and probes to conduct a mission to Venus. Since no human is going to land on Venus anytime soon, there may be no motivation to go there.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
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