We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

ReeceAres · 2005-05-18 08:45:59

There is nothing complicated about going to Mars, just as there is nothin complicated about going to the moon, or at least, nothin that a computer with less processing power than my mobile phone cant do. has anyone read Voyage, by Stephen Baxter? All we needed was a space station and an orbital injection booster: variably the NERVA or a modified Saturn stage. the only undefined article that would have to be built is the MEM: a 30 day on the surface for 3 or 4 guys with a rover and other science objectives. we could have had 3 or 4 missions or even more: but what for? Why go more than once????

So what do you guys think about the mission profile of an Apollo Mars mission, and any websites with details about anything that was planned of that sort????

Reece

GCNRevenger · 2005-05-18 10:24:30

I believe I have seen this book... And I think you mean, we could have gone to Mars with the Saturn-V and not so much getting there with Apollo Lunar hardware.

Its not implausable, not entirely anyway, it just would have been expensive and not a little dangerous. Since they would have traveled by a conjunction rather then opposition trajectory, it would have required the crew to spend a nine-month stint in zero-G and fly closer to the Sun (and soak up more radiation). It would have been expensive because of the need for multiple Saturn-class rockets (which are NOT cheap) and extensive orbital assembly. As such, it wouldn't be a sustainable mission arcitecture.

We need a method of getting to Mars which is not as expensive, minimizes the time spent in transit, leverage Martian fuel production to reduce total launch mass, and hopefully have a clear transition to a reuseable system (at least partially) once a Martian base is started.

C M Edwards · 2005-05-18 13:14:23

Has anyone read Voyage, by Stephen Baxter?

This book may not be the best comparison. Didn't all of the main characters die as a result of various equipment problems? (Good book, with wonderful descriptions of of the Apollo hardware. I'm still "at stable two" in my nightmares!)

Still, when I consider the amount of material those Saturn V rockets launched over the course of the Apollo program, a comparison with Space Station Alpha indicates that they could have handled enough hardware to get a crew to Mars, even if the on-orbit assembly took three years.

How many years ago did the first one fly? Almost forty?

Grypd · 2005-05-18 13:33:47

Apollo and the genre of rockets where designed to be the basis to get to colonise the Moon and Mars. They where just planned to fly every day and deliver equipment and stores daily to a pinwheel type space station and then to actually manufacture the spacecraft in space. Of course the cost would have bankrupted NASA but it was planned.

PurduesUSAFguy · 2005-05-18 18:33:22

The manned mission they talked about in voyage, although doable with Apollo era hardware, I mean, it was basically sky lab+upperstage+MEM, but it seems strange to me to go on a two year mission with 30 days of surface time.

I do think we could have been beter off taking, gasp I hate to call it this, the Russian approach and stuck with the Saturn V and evolved it. Slowly added F1a engines, SRBs gotten it up to 200 tonnes to orbit, added a nerva upperstage. Using Skylabs as a standard module we could have thrown up big space stations in both lunar and Earth orbit and been on mars by now. Assumming funding had remained basically flat after Apollo and we hadn't had this massive shuttle/space station detour...

Playing the what could have been game angers me because I am increasing resigned to the fact that we are never going to get the space program going again in any significant way and it's the greatest tragedy of the 21st century.

srmeaney · 2005-05-19 07:07:29

Playing the what could have been game angers me because I am increasing resigned to the fact that we are never going to get the space program going again in any significant way and it's the greatest tragedy of the 21st century.

And if we want to go then we must decide why? if it is just to send a couple of guys to pland a flag and say "beat that, you commies!" and get a few dollars increase on the value of the national currency, Then there is no point. But if you are saying lets colonize this new world. Lets Send people there and build a World spanning Nation of Mars then there is only one answer that the Majority will agree too.
You must declare Mars a Nation from the very beginning. It must have its own Constitution and Laws. It must have title to the territory before anyone even leaves the Earth.
It must Be able to borrow against It's inherent mineral wealth and use that wealth to employ people here on earth to build what it needs to send it's own citizens for the purpose of colonization.
It must own the infrastructure that gets put in space to house people and move people.
It must have the ability to open the doors and say If you want in, be a citizen of the nation of Mars. We are not going to bring people home if they dont like it. We are going to create a new world. You need some skills in certain areas. We will train and educate you where needed but preference will be given at certain points to specialists who are willing to work for little more than a share of the resources and the right citizenship.
Earth nations will only profit from the contracts and the sustained increase in Space technology that will come from supporting a mass human migration to Mars.
That is why it needs to be about sending ten million people to Mars within a hundred years.

ReeceAres · 2005-05-19 07:37:21

I aint in to all of this new world stuff. we arent advanced enough psychologically to cope with that, monetary or technically capable. Lets go because its a challenge! and hard to do, leave a flag and some footprints!!

GCNRevenger · 2005-05-19 07:55:11

A neat idea, and may eventually happen, but not in the short term. A Martian base will have nothing it can offer the home planet economically for a long time, and will require the donation of tens of billions of dollars in support for years until a colony could be >90% self-sufficent... And even then, colonists might not jump at the chance to be their own soverign state.

As far as a Mars mission being an Apollo-like "flags and footprints" mission, I think that is the worst possible thing that could happen. If we aren't going with a mind to staying, don't bother going at all until we do.

RobertDyck · 2005-05-19 10:04:30

John F. Kennedy felt the need to "win" the space race against the Soviets because so many countries felt the Soviets were world leaders in technological advancement as well as military power. Sputnik was a great technical advance, but military thinkers saw it as a demonstration that the Soviets could deliver a nuclear warhead any on the planet. This led countries to ally themselves with the Soviet Union instead of America, providing not only military allies, but more importantly adding their resources to the Soviets by integrating their economy with the communist world. Once America entered the space race the Soviets beat America at every goal: first animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space walk, etc. JFK felt he needed a goal that the Soviets couldn't achieve before America. The Moon was that goal. It was so far away that the Soviet lead in space wasn't a major factor, America had time to catch up and pass the Soviets on just this one objective. Then marketing guys had to make America's goal sound all important, they had to downplay the Soviet lead in space and all the goals the Soviets achieved first. That's why Apollo was so strongly marketed to the media and astronauts were flown all over the world. In fact, the Soviets landed an unmanned probe on the Moon before America and followed the Moon race with a program to build space stations. The Soviets built 8 space stations, Salyut 1-7 and Mir. Some Salyut stations were scientific, some military; some were successful others not. Skylab may have been big but it wasn't nearly as advanced as Salyut 7. Mir was an advancement on the Salyut 7 design, and bigger. Some military planners would argue space stations in Earth orbit have more military strategic value than a manned science mission to the Moon, but America succeeded in its marketing campaign. The Soviets considered a manned mission to Mars to trump America's win on the Moon, but their attempt to send an unmanned probe to Mars failed.

People within NASA wanted to be constructive, to demonstrate peace and improvements to society through technological advancement. Soviet space workers also wanted to achieve wondrous technological goals. However, the government planners in the federal government of both countries had much less noble goals. The Moon race was a gigantic stunt to impress allies so the winning country's economy would gain resources of the allied economy.

Today the member nations of the WTO share their economic resources with each other. Any space stunt is irrelevant. The argument "Lets go because its a challenge! and hard to do, leave a flag and some footprints!!" no longer has any value.

C M Edwards · 2005-05-19 14:21:18

Didn't all of the main characters die as a result of various equipment problems?

Oops! Sorry. That was Titan by Stephen Baxter. Same author, same premise, but more dead people.

Fledi · 2005-05-19 16:37:18

In "Titan" the two main characters survived by jumping into that 100 and some Kelvin cold methane lake and deep freezing themselves by that. One of them even poured some bacteria into the lake first which then became the seed for a new living ecosystem that evolved at Titan when the sun went Nova and warmed it up. The intelligent species of that ecosystem then recovered them from their frozen state and placed the two into some kind of reservate on the planet.
Was a great book though quite depressing about the space efforts of current time (like all books from Stephen Baxter). He foresaw a disaster with the Columbia and the space station never being finished in that book.

The Soviet space program went well as long as Koroljev was leading it. After his death everything started to go wrong.

Srmeaney, somehow I like the stubborn way you keep repeating "10 Millions to Mars" over and over again. It's a nice counterbalance to all the short-sighted footprint or nothing at all suggestions.

srmeaney · 2005-05-20 06:25:04

Srmeaney, somehow I like the stubborn way you keep repeating "10 Millions to Mars" over and over again. It's a nice counterbalance to all the short-sighted footprint or nothing at all suggestions.

Thanks, I think...

I thought I was starting to sound like God kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden...
"Stay as long as you wish, just dont pick that fruit."
"Bugger you old man, Were in charge now!" Chop, chop, burn Hack, slash, scream.
"Guards, Kick those Vermin out!"

I aint in to all of this new world stuff. we arent advanced enough psychologically to cope with that, monetary or technically capable. Lets go because its a challenge! and hard to do, leave a flag and some footprints!!

So you are not willing to surrender your citizenship, leave behind everything you have that keeps you psycologicaly, economicly, and physicaly safe and just go to Mars?

A neat idea, and may eventually happen, but not in the short term. A Martian base will have nothing it can offer the home planet economically for a long time, and will require the donation of tens of billions of dollars in support for years until a colony could be >90% self-sufficent... And even then, colonists might not jump at the chance to be their own soverign state.

The short term economic benifits will always be from the contracts needed to produce infrastructure. Donations? May be afterwards when the dust is settled, we will be more than happy to have a big donation from Pizza Hut to build a small pizzashop in a cave near the spaceport, but at ten thousand dollars a Pizza...the local currency will be either little statues carved from martian rock (or a check from the government of Mars for having provided ten million Pizzas a year).

"How many Waldos is that to a gromit?"

Chazbro38 · 2005-05-21 13:45:26

I think they meant that once NASA had developed the Apollo-Saturn vehicle that the state of the art had been sufficiently advanced that we could have gone on to Mars with it if we had really wanted to.I don't think there is much doubt that the Apollo-Saturn technology base is adequete to go to Mars and back successfully, the real question is it desirable at this point. You would think that with all the advances in materials, physics, propulsion chemistry, aerospace engineering and astronautics that have occured since the first Apollo-Saturn stack flew in 1966 and today we could easily come up with something better, cheaper, faster if not more politically viable by now just using currently existing techbologies but you really don't hear about that too much these days.

Charlie

RobS · 2005-05-22 15:33:16

Frankly, I am not sure what is being argued here. The Saturn V was big enough to launch a Mars spacecraft into Earth orbit. But the Apollo Service Module was insufficient to power a flight to Mars and the Command Module was too small to fly there. Skylab's life support systems were never designed to be repaired and kept functioning for two six-month periods separated by eighteen months. So there really was nothing for the Saturn V to launch into orbit, let alone send the astronauts on a flyby of Mars, let alone take them to the surface. We certainly could NOT have gone to Mars with Apollo. Maybe after another 25 billion 1965-dollars had been spent, yes (but that's 100 billion or more; more than we NEED to spend today).

-- RobS

srmeaney · 2005-05-22 17:59:56

Frankly, I am not sure what is being argued here. The Saturn V was big enough to launch a Mars spacecraft into Earth orbit. But the Apollo Service Module was insufficient to power a flight to Mars and the Command Module was too small to fly there. Skylab's life support systems were never designed to be repaired and kept functioning for two six-month periods separated by eighteen months. So there really was nothing for the Saturn V to launch into orbit, let alone send the astronauts on a flyby of Mars, let alone take them to the surface. We certainly could NOT have gone to Mars with Apollo. Maybe after another 25 billion 1965-dollars had been spent, yes (but that's 100 billion or more; more than we NEED to spend today).

I think they were having flashbacks to the Cover of popular mechanics/science where it sported a capsule and transhab module pushed by a big rocket motor. The idea was that you could send the transhab packed in the space of a slightly larger lunar lander and simply turn the command module around to allow crews to expand it and live in it along the trip to Mars. It simply meant that the third stage would be fare more substantial than it was for the Apollo missions (a saturn that didn't tapre to a point but looked more like the big russian proton lifter.
The Command module on the otherhand would be an orbit return vehicle larger than the deltaclipper.

So a mission would go something like this.
A.Orbit and Assemble
1. the saturn would launch a transhab and modified deltaclipper into orbit and leave them there.
2. a shuttle would launch and a crew would transfer over with everything they were taking and expand the transhab.
3. The russians would also launch a motor stage designed to expand out a big structural frame to distance the hab from the motor.
The crew would space walk to fit the systems.
B. The crew would launch to Mars, if they survive this low rad shielding run, motor and transhab would return to earth for next crew and first crew would land near all the forward deployed food and equipment and hope to hell that the permafrost doesnt collapse under them when they land.

Considering the endeavour shuttle cost "$2 Billion dollars" to build and half a billion to launch.

Single Mission cost $20 Billion. Crew Five Asked before hand if they want to stay.

RobertDyck · 2005-05-22 21:40:49

Life support: good point. NASA did have the NERVA engine and had completed ground tests so a test in Earth orbit was the only test before using as the TMI stage for a manned mission to Mars. However, NASA had no idea how to support life that long. In fact, as I said once before I saw a TV interview with Dan Goldin who said the reason he wanted Russian participation in ISS was that America had no idea how to build life support for a space station, and Russia had a docking adapter for large modules. If America couldn't build life support for several months in LEO then how could they survive a 26 month round trip?

In the 1970s NASA intended to follow Skylab with Skylab B using the backup Skylab. Then a second Skylab workshop (Advanced or International Skylab) would be launched and docked to Skkylab B to form the core of an international space station. Since this followed the Apollo-Soyuz mission, both Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft would service it, then the Space Shuttle. Cost using left-over Apollo hardware would have been $220 to $650 million. Today the backup Skylab is in the Smithsonian. However, both Skylab and backup Skylab used bottled oxygen and lithium hydroxide to remove CO2. It didn't have a recycling life support system, and wasn't even able to refill the oxygen tank. They would have had to invent a recycling life support system before Advanced Skylab.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2023-08-21 19:39:58

Today NASA at less than one half of one percent,
the knowledge is lacking completion.

I think they could have gone to Mars, maybe not fully healthy perhaps lacking experience, locked in smaller space and upon return maybe suffering cancers.

NASA may delay crewed lunar landing beyond Artemis 3 mission
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/2 … -3-mission

Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?
https://www.popsci.com/science/modern-s … -moon-ice/

NASA must de-orbit the Space Station and say ‘dasvidaniya’ to Russia

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-se … to-russia/

Grimes on Living Forever, Dying on Mars, and Giving Elon Musk Ideas for His Best (Worst) Tweets
https://www.wired.com/story/grimes-big-interview/

NASA Studying How To Profit From The Moon
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/sci/n … onomy.html

Finish line was the Moon, maybe if Soviets did a robotic sample return from another planet?

https://www.wired.com/2012/06/the-last- … plan-1971/

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-08-21 19:40:53)

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#1 2005-05-18 08:45:59

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#2 2005-05-18 10:24:30

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#3 2005-05-18 13:14:23

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#4 2005-05-18 13:33:47

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#5 2005-05-18 18:33:22

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#6 2005-05-19 07:07:29

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#7 2005-05-19 07:37:21

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#8 2005-05-19 07:55:11

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#9 2005-05-19 10:04:30

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#10 2005-05-19 14:21:18

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#11 2005-05-19 16:37:18

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#12 2005-05-20 06:25:04

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#13 2005-05-21 13:45:26

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#14 2005-05-22 15:33:16

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#15 2005-05-22 17:59:56

Re: We Could Have Gone To Mars With Apollo!

#16 2005-05-22 21:40:49

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#17 2023-08-21 19:39:58

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