An Astronaut from the South Side

In 1969, NASA hired seven new astronauts. What's different about these seven than most NASA astronauts is that all of them already were astronauts before they were actually hired by NASA. That's not to say that they'd flown in space before: none of them had. However, all seven had already been trained as astronauts by the U.S. Air Force, as part of its military space program.

The Air Force established a space program soon after it was created as a separate branch of the military in 1947. Throughout the 1960s, the Air Force hired 17 pilots from the Air Force, Marine, and Navy, intending to send them to a military space station, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.

The planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
Source: Wikipedia.

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory would have been a surveillance platform and a temporary home for military astronauts who would spend their time watching and photographing the Earth below. But unmanned satellite technology pretty soon advanced to the point where it was just as effective (and much, much cheaper) than sending astronauts into orbit to photograph the Earth. So, in 1969, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was cancelled, and 7 of the youngest of the 17 Air Force astronaut were hired as NASA astronauts. All 7 eventually flew on the space shuttle in the 1980s.

Another view of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
Source: NASA.

What happened to the other 10 Air Force astronauts at the end of the program? Most resumed work for the branch of the service they had originally worked for, with some flying combat missions in Vietnam and one former astronaut, James Abrahamson, advancing to the rank of general. One became a pilot for NASA. One went back to school for a master's degree. One died in a T-38 crash in 1970.

But by the time the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was cancelled, two of the 17 had already been killed in training accidents. It's a shockingly high number, though unfortunately not surprising, given that all 17 were military pilots, and many flew experimental aircraft.

One of the 17, a test pilot named Major Michael Adams, died in a plane crash in 1967. He took his X-15 over 50 miles above the Earth's surface. The Air Force considers 50+ miles to be outer space and awards astronaut wings to pilots who fly that high. Minutes later, travelling at over 3,400 miles per hour, Major Adams' X-15 went into the world's first "hypersonic spin." Amazingly, he was initially able to recover control over the craft, but at that point it was plummeting towards the ground, and it's believed that the g-forces caused him to loose consciousness. Thus he was unable to eject from the plane when the stress of the dive tore it apart.

Major Michael Adams.
Source: Wikipedia.

The other one of the 17, Major Robert Lawrence Jr., died in 1967 while serving as a flight instructor. The plane his trainee was flying crashed on landing. Major Lawrence's ejection seat malfunctioned, threw him out of the plane horizontally, and he died on impact.

Major Robert Lawrence.
Source: MSNBC.

If he had lived to join the 1969 NASA astronaut class, Major Lawrence would have become NASA's first African-American astronaut. But instead, NASA did not hire any African-American astronauts until 1978, and Colonel Guion Bluford became the first African-American in space in 1983.

The 1978 astronaut class.
Source: Wikipedia.

Major Lawrence was born and raised where I now live: on the South Side of Chicago! For any interested locals, his childhood home was on the corner of 23rd Street and South State Street. We drove over to that block the other evening. Back when Major Lawrence was born in the 1930s, it was working class, all townhouses and apartment buildings. By the time he died, the neighborhood had gone downhill and been turned into housing projects. But the projects have since been razed, and most of his block is now an empty field.

South State Street and 23rd Street: the birthplace of an astronaut!

In interviews a few weeks after his death, Major Lawrence's family shared their favorite memories of the deceased astronaut. Throughout his childhood, he loved playing chess and building model airplanes. He was musically gifted, and was once hit by a truck on his way to piano lessons, only to pick himself up, brush himself off, and make it to the lesson on time. Major Lawrence asked for the same Christmas present every year: a larger and more advanced chemistry set than he'd gotten the previous Christmas.

In high school, Lawrence lettered in cross-country and track and field. He graduated early, at age 16. In college, he majored in Chemistry and joined the ROTC. After graduating, he served as a test pilot and instructor pilot, training both U.S. Air Force and German Air Force pilots. Since he was a test pilot, I suppose it goes without saying that he owned a Porche and drove it too fast (or as his father called it, "flew too low").

By the time he was thirty, Major Lawrence had earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry at Ohio State. When he was thirty-one, he was selected as an Air Force astronaut. He he died two months after his thirty-second birthday.

The 1967 class of Air Force Astronauts.
The three who lived became Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a NASA astronaut; and a General.
Source: CollectSpace.

Major Lawrence left behind a wife, Barbara Cress Lawrence, and young son. In 2007, his widow spoke about the prejudice Lawrence encountered as the first African-American astronaut during a StoryCorps interview. The interview is available here.

Since they didn't fly on NASA missions, Majors Lawrence and Adams have been largely forgotten by history. Eight deceased astronauts and six deceased cosmonauts were memorialized in a plaque the Apollo 15 astronauts left on the moon in 1971, but Adams and Lawrence, the only two deceased Air Force astronauts, were not named on the plaque. 

The Fallen Astronaut memorial at Hadley Rille.
Source: Wikipedia.

Major Adams was honored on the Astronaut Memorial at Cape Canaveral when it opened in 1991. Major Lawrence was not. The questionable bureaucratic reasoning for this omission was that unlike Adams, Lawrence had not been awarded Air Force astronaut wings. Mrs. Lawrence fought hard to have her husband awarded Air Force astronaut wings and added to the Astronaut Memorial. She finally succeeded in 1997.

The Astronaut Memorial at Cape Canaveral; Majors Adams and Lawrence are at the top left and right.
Source:  http://mahe36.blogspot.com.

Source: MSNBC; NASA; Lodi News-Sentinel; Wikipedia; Vintage Space; Ebony (February 1968 and February 1984); StoryCorps; Encyclopedia.com; The X Hunters; CollectSpace.

Making space travel a little safer

Rockets launched from Kennedy Space Center are aimed towards the Atlantic. Assuming a launch goes as planned, the rocket will not fly over a populated area. The Space Shuttle, for example, jettisoned its fuel tank and solid rocket boosters out over the Atlantic about two minutes into launch.

But what if something went wrong? What if a rocket malfunctioned, went off course, and headed straight for a city along the eastern seaboard?

Atlantis's last launch.
Source: Huntsville Real Estate Blog.

If a rocket threatens a populated area, it has to be destroyed. So at every Cape Canaveral launch, there's a U.S. Air Force Range Safety Officer on the premises, sitting in front of a panel that looks something like this:

Range safety panel, dating from launches in the 1960s.
Source: Popular Mechanics.

 
Ever since 1950, the Air Force has been charged with ensuring the safety of the Eastern Test Range. This range extends from Florida to Maine, encompassing the entire east coast of the United States. Cape Canaveral Air Station Range Safety Officers have two responsibilities at each NASA launch:

1. The Range Safety Officer can stop a launch from happening. 

Kennedy Space Center Mission Control is literally unable to ignite a rocket until the Range Safety Officer flips the switch permitting the launch to proceed. If the Range Safety Officer determines that the rocket is not functioning correctly and may veer off course and endanger a populated area, protocol requires him or her to prevent launch. For example, during the Space Shuttle Discovery's final flight last year, an error message gave the RS Officer pause. So, he waited to throw the go/no-go switch until he had resolved his questions about the error message. This left NASA mission control only two seconds to launch before that day's launch window closed.

RS Officers can also stop launches near the Atlantic if boats stray inside the security perimeter downrange of the launch. They even stop launches if high-altitude clouds are present, since these clouds cause radio interference. Radio interference could prevent an RS Officer from fulfilling the second part of his or her mission, described below.

The Space Shuttle's flight path.
Source: Universe Today.

   
2. The Range Safety Officer can detonate a rocket if it threatens a populated area.

Every single rocket launched from Cape Canaveral is wired with explosive charges. If something goes wrong and the rocket veers off course towards a populated area, the RS Officer must send a radio signal to the rocket, detonating it. This even applies to manned launches. In some instances, the spacecraft itself is also armed.

A Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster.
See the Range Safety detonation system near the top right.
Source: Wikipedia.

RS Officers have made the grave decision to detonate NASA rockets a few times over the years. For example, 43 second after launch in 1961, an Atlas rocket was detonated when it stopped following its flight plan. The unmanned Mercury capsule strapped to the Atlas was saved by its launch escape system. Similarly, five minutes after launch in 1962, Venus-bound Mariner 1's rocket malfunctioned, and had to be blown up by a RS Officer.

Astronauts have never died as a result of an RS Officer's detonation command. But, on one occasion, an RS Officer has detonated a manned launch.  After Challenger broke apart during its launch in 1986, its solid rocket boosters were still flying, unguided, off the Florida coast. So the RS officer had to destroy them.

A space shuttle launch:
dangerous for the astronauts, and for folks on Earth.
Source: Stuck in Customs.

At first glance, it seems that RS Officers have a grim and thankless job. Back in the 1980s, a White Sands Missile Range RS Officer recounted the stress of a typical launch decision:

One night I told a well-known and politically powerful upper-air scientist that the unguided Aerobee [rocket] would impact off the range. Therefore, I told him he should cancel... He said he was the Project Scientist, he needed the data, the delay would result in a budget over-run, and therefore he was going to launch. I replied that I would push the destruct button the instant the rocket cleared the launch tower.

He launched. I pushed the button. The commanding officer called me into his office the next morning and asked me what happened; I told him. Nothing more was said because the Word of the Safety Officer is the Word of God. There can be no tribunal that can over-rule or second-guess the Safety Officer. There can be no retribution against the Safety Officer. He calls the shots. If he calls to many unsafe ones, the range commander... transfers him to some other position.

It may seem creepy that an already incredibly dangerous space mission is made even more hazardous by wiring demolition charges to the rockets. But space flight will always be risky, and RS officers make it a little safer, at least for those of us on Earth. Thanks to RS Officers, no one on Earth has ever been killed by a NASA launch.

---

A cheery addendum to this post: My dear friend Paulina hosts an awesome website, Smile Play Learn, where she explores books, crafts, and activities with her two little boys. Just a few days ago she blogged about a neat outer space project: making a diagram of the phases of the moon. Isn't that a fun idea?

Sources: Yarchive.net; Collect Space; Space.com; Wikipedia; NASA; Popular Mechanics; Wired4Space.

A weighty subject

The boyfriend and I re-watched '2001: A Space Odyssey' the other day. After fast-forwarding through the first 20 minutes of ape fights, I really enjoyed it. It's such a neat-looking movie.

2001!
Source: IMDB.

If you've seen '2001' (and if you're nerdy enough to read this blog, I'm guessing you have) then you will recall the first scene set on the Jupiter-bound spaceship. The camera follows Dave as he runs laps through the ship's centrifuge.

1969 called, it wants those shorts back.
Source:  https://dannyisntheremrstorrance.wordpress.com/.

That scene got me thinking: wouldn't it be great if there was a gravity-simulating centrifuge on the International Space Station? The half dozen astronauts and cosmonauts living on the ISS could certainly use one. Living in microgravity, they suffer through rigorous, hours-long daily workouts in an effort to stave off the negative effects of microgravity on the body. And my understanding is that even with extreme workouts, you still loose lots of bone and muscle mass by the time you return to Earth.

Astronaut Suni Williams running the Boston Marathon aboard the ISS.
Source: NASA.

There is actually a centrifuge aboard the ISS, and there's an interesting history behind it. The tiny, refrigerated centrifuge doesn't hold anything bigger than a test tube, and it seems to be used more for separating liquid samples than for any actual gravity experiments.

The ISS centrifuge.
Source: NASA.

But initially, when planning for the ISS first began, folks anticipated building a centrifuge big enough to actually hold people. The centrifuge would have dramatically increased the station's power needs, so a tower of Russian solar panels would have been added to boost power output. This plan was quickly scaled down because of funding and engineering concerns.

An early design, featuring a solar "power tower."
Source: Wikipedia.

The person-sized centrifuge design was replaced with the Japanese-designed Centrifuge Accommodations Module. This would have held an eight foot in diameter centrifuge. It would have been attached to the rest of the station on special vibration-absorbing mounts designed to damp out the effect of the rotation on the rest of the ISS.

While an eight foot centrifuge wouldn't be big enough to hold an astronaut, it could have generated up to two times Earth gravity for plants and animals less than two feet tall. This would have been an exciting development- we could have made real progress in learning to combat the negative effects of life in microgravity. And we would have learned how animals from Earth would adapt to survive long-term on a lower gravity planet.

The 8 foot wide centrifuge.
Source: JAXA.

But, plans for this medium-sized centrifuge were scrapped years ago. The partially constructed Centrifuge Accommodations Module sits in a parking lot outside the Tsukuba Space Center, just north of Toyko. You can visit it! Which is neat, but not as neat as if it was installed on the International Space Station.

The Centrifuge Accommodations Module.
Source: Wikipedia.

Is there any hope for a '2001: A Space Odyssey' style centrifuge in Earth orbit in the near future? Maybe! Recent Obama administration budget proposals included funding for an 8 foot diameter or larger centrifuge on the ISS. And then hopefully the knowledge gleaned from experiments on that centrifuge could be applied to manned missions beyond Earth orbit...

Artificial gravity!
Source:  http://toninetica.tumblr.com/.

Source: NBC News; NASA; Wikipdedia; Quora; Space.com.

Fly (only) me to the moon...

What would it have been like if the Soviets had beat the U.S. to the moon? Nobody would've eaten ham salad on the moon (no great loss). Frank Sinatra's 'Fly Me to the Moon' wouldn't have been the first song played on the lunar surface. Alan Shepard couldn't have smuggled a six iron onto the moon and hit a golf ball over the horizon.

Forget Augusta National: the world's most exclusive golf course.
Source: Wimmerspace.

Aside from those distinctly American touches, how would a Soviet landing have differed from a U.S. landing? For starters, the Soviets planned to send only one cosmonaut to the lunar surface, while the U.S. landed two astronauts at a time. Sending just one astronaut down to the moon saves lots of fuel weight. The Soviets needed to save weight because their lunar rocket, the N1, wasn't as powerful as the U.S.'s Saturn V.

Neil and Buzz on the moon.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In addition to landing just one cosmonaut, other weight-saving shortcuts were introduced. The Soviet lunar lander would have used the same engine for descent and landing. This was a risky choice. The U.S. lunar module design featured separate engines for descent and landing so that the craft could abort at almost any time during the landing, by igniting the ascent stage and jettisoning the landing engine.

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Soviet lander and orbiter had no docking ports. After ascending from the moon the cosmonaut would have to spacewalk between the lander and orbiter. On the return trip from the moon, he'd be dragging along bags of lunar rocks, core samples, and film as he floated back to the spaceship that would return him to Earth.

A Soviet lunar lander- sitting in Kazakhstan, not on the moon.
Source: Wired Science.

Aside from weight-saving measures, other innovations were necessary to ensure that the lunar landing could be accomplished by just one person acting alone. The Soviet landing would have featured a spacesuit designed specially for a one-man landing. The Krechet spacesuit was all one piece, with a door in the back. You'd simply step through a door into the suit, rather than pulling on and connecting separate top and bottom pieces, as the Apollo astronauts did. The suit included included a large metal hoop on its back, to be used by the cosmonaut to pick himself up if he fell on the moon. The solo cosmonaut could grab onto the hoop, and swing it around to right himself and stand back up.

The Krechet suit, without the hoop.
Source: English Russia.

With all this planning, why didn't the Soviets land a man on the moon? The problem was the N1 rocket. It never became a reliable ride, as its development was doomed from the start. The N1 was a massive engineering project, requiring new fuels and technology never attempted before in the Soviet Union. But work on the N1 began a full five years after work on the Saturn V started. All the while, the N1 project was severely underfunded. In the end, there were only four N1 test launches, and all failed.

An N1 launch explodes a few seconds after launch.

Source: Youtube.

However, a smaller Soviet rocket called the Proton managed to successfully launched a prototype of a manned lunar flyby spacecraft, though without any passengers aboard. This mission, Zond 7, performed as intended and landed safely in the Soviet Union on August 14, 1969.

But as it happened, the most famous journey on August 14, 1969 wasn't the Zond 7's return to Earth. It was Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin's ticker-tape parade through lower Manhattan. The occasion? Celebrating their return from the lunar surface a few weeks earlier.

New York, New York; August 14, 1969.
Source: The Guardian.

Also! Last week's advice for future lunar travelers was featured over on a really neat blog called Vintage Space. Vintage Space linked to the post as part of the blog series 'Carnival of Space'; you can check it out here.

Sources: Wikipedia; Wired Science; Ben Evans, Foothold in the Seventies; Russianspaceweb.com.

Majoring in 'The Right Stuff'

It's back-to-school time, people! Let's say you're a rising high school senior, with long-term plans to travel to the moon. Where should you go to college?

Starfleet Academy: don't bother applying for a few hundred years.
Source: Wikipedia.

For the purpose of this blog post, I'll assume you meet a few depressing historical requirements. For example- you better be graduating from high school in the early 1950s, you'll need to be American, male, and have 20/20 vision. And you ought to learn to fly this:

A T-38; astronauts' jet trainer.
Source: Wikipedia.

A total of 24 men have orbited the moon; 12 of them walked on it. What lessons can we learn from their college choices?

1. Your best bet is a service academy. Not the Coast Guard Academy or the Air Force Academy, though. The Air Force Academy didn't exist till 1954, so most Apollo astronauts missed out on it by a couple years. The most popular college among the 24 is the Naval Academy (6 graduates traveled to the moon) or second to that, West Point (4 graduates traveled to the moon). But, if you can't secure a Congressional nomination to a service academy, don't worry, there are other options...

2. Hoosiers travel to the moon and get in-state tuition. After the Naval Academy and West Point, the third most popular college choice is Indiana's Purdue University. The first and last men to walk on the moon were Boilermakers: Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan.

3. No need to be fancy, y'all. Counting the service academies, 21 out of the 24 men attended public schools. No Harvard, Yale, or Stanford grad has ever walked on the moon. Only one Ivy Leaguer traveled to the moon. That would be Pete Conrad, Princeton grad and Commander of Apollo 12. His first word upon stepping off the ladder onto the lunar surface: "Whoopie!"

4. It's okay to be a late bloomer. One Apollo 13 astronaut, Fred Haise, started out at community college before transferring to University of Oklahoma. Apollo 14 Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa attended three different colleges before graduating cum laude from Colorado State at age 27. Even if college wasn't a priority, Stu was keeping busy: his first job out of high school was as a smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service.

5. If it isn't NCAA Division 1 in football, don't bother. This is true unless the word "Technology" appears in your school's name. One of the 24 was an MIT grad, another a Cal Tech grad. Also, this rule doesn't apply if you are Pete Conrad. (Whoopie!) But otherwise, the better your school is at football, the better your chances are of going to the moon. An Auburn grad, a University of Texas grad, a Georgia Tech Grad, and two former University of Michigan students traveled to the moon.

The stars at night, are big and bright (*clap clap clap clap*)
Source: Scientific American.

So here's the full list of undergrad alma maters. First, the men who walked on the moon:

1. Neil Armstrong - Purdue U.
2. Buzz Aldrin - U.S. Naval Academy
3. Pete Conrad - Princeton U.
4. Alan Bean - University of Texas at Austin
5. Alan Shepard - U.S. Naval Academy
6. Ed Mitchell - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7. Dave Scott - University of Michigan for one year, then the U.S. Military Academy
8. Jim Irwin - University of Michigan
9. John Young - Georgia Tech
10. Charles Duke (an N.C. native!!) - U.S. Naval Academy
11. Gene Cernan - Purdue University
12. Harrison Schmitt - California Institute of Technology

Second, the men who traveled to the moon:

1. Frank Borman - U.S. Military Academy
2. Jim Lovell - University of Wisconsin-Madison for two years, then the U.S. Naval Academy
3. Bill Anders - U.S. Naval Academy
4. Thomas Stafford - U.S. Naval Academy
5. Michael Collins - U.S. Military Academy
6. Ronald Evans - University of Kansas
7. Ken Mattingly - Auburn University
8. Al Worden - U.S. Military Academy
9. Fred Haise - Mississippi Gulfcoast Community College, then University of Oklahoma
10. Jack Swigert - University of Colorado at Boulder
11. Richard Gordon - University of Washington - Seattle
12. Stuart Roosa - Oklahoma State University, University of Arizona, Colorado State University

I considered lying and making up a 25th astronaut who attended my alma mater (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- go Tar Heels!). But I kept things honest. After all, UNC played its part in the moon landings. 23 of the 24 astronauts were trained in celestial navigation at UNC's Morehead Planetarium! 

Nothing finer than to be in Carolina!
Source: UNC.

Sources: Wikipedia, Morehead Planetarium; Andrew Chaiken's A Man on the Moon.

Drama on Lake Tenzig!

I was wondering why Russian space capsules are shaped differently than U.S. space capsules. Here's what I mean by that. Take a look at the Vostok I, right Yuri Gagarin's historic flight:

Vostok I.
Source: sciencephoto.com. 

It's shaped like a sphere, right? And here is Freedom 7, right after Alan Shepard's splashdown.

Recovering Freedom 7.
Source: History.com.

See how Freedom 7 is shaped like a cone? The difference persisted for several decades, with the Soviet Voskhod and the (now Russian) Soyuz re-entry crafts shaped roughly like spheres, and the American Mercury, Gemini ,and Apollo crafts looking like stubby ice cream cones. I wondered why. You have two space-faring societies trying to accomplish roughly the same missions in space. Many of their engineers shared the same training, as both the Soviets and the Americans ended up with German rocket scientists after World War Two. Shouldn't any differences in spacecraft design be relatively minor?

It turns out there are a number of practical reasons why U.S. and Soviet space capsules had different shapes. For example, the crafts landed differently. U.S. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions all splashed down in the Atlantic or Pacific.

Spashdown site for the Mercury, Gemini, and a few Apollo missions.
Source: Wikipedia.

But Soviet and Russian spacecraft all land in Asia, set down on the ground. The ice cream cone design sits well in the water. It'll float, pointy end up. That's not a concern if you're landing in a desert in the middle of Kazakhstan. No need to make sure your spacecraft is seaworthy. It's just a spaceship, not a boat.

The Soviet Union, and then Russia, has landed 122 manned spacecraft in Central Asia. Every single one landed on solid ground... with one exception. Soyuz 23 landed in the middle of a lake. And that landing very nearly killed the crew!

The Soyuz 23 crew:
Manning the first combination spacecraft/submarine/icebreaker.
Source: Videocosmos.

Despite the preference for ground landings, Soyuzes are designed to survive water landings. The problem was the weather at Lake Tenzig on that particular day.

Lake Tenzig in the "winter."
Source: Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

Soyuz 23 landed in northern Kazakhstan in mid-October, which apparently is winter there. Weather conditions at the landing site were awful. It was nighttime, -8 degrees Fahrenheit, in the middle of a blizzard. The lake was fogged in. The craft landed 5 miles offshore,and its landing shattered the surrounding ice. Its parachute soaked through, and the weight of the wet parachute flipped the capsule upside down so that the hatch was submerged. That was when Soyuz 23 became the first space-faring submarine. Its air intake valve was also underwater, so the astronauts had only the time-limited air supply that came with them from space. The cosmonauts cut off most of their instruments to conserve power and thus managed to keep the CO2 scrubbers running. That way, they could keep breathing for a while... though they must have been pretty chilly.

Cosmonauts Zudov and Rozdestvensy awaiting rescue.
Source: Videocosmos.

Since the lake was only partially frozen, and surrounded by bogs, neither boats nor amphibious vehicles could reach the craft. Rescue was delayed eight hours, till dawn, when helicopters could be safety brought in to tow the ship (with the cosmonauts still in it) to shore. The situation was bad enough that the rescue crew was surprised that the cosmonauts were still alive. Soyuz 23 Mission Engineer Valery Rozhdestvensky  recalled, "when I got to see our photos and how they dragged the capsule - then I really was frightened - the only time in my life I was really frightened."

Soyuz 23, towed to shore.
Source: Epizodspace.

What a rough night. Neither of the Soyuz 23 cosmonauts ever flew in space again. As for other reasons behind the different spacecraft designs: I'll talk more about that in my next blog post...

Sources: Wikipedia; Videocosmos; Epizodspace.

1978: A Space Odyssey

In 1972, the last Apollo lunar mission left the moon (that would be Apollo 17 if you believe Tom Hanks or Apollo 18 if you prefer alien attacks to facts). Since then, we've put a couple space stations in orbit, launched 135 space shuttle missions, and now humans even have a pet robot the size of a pickup truck living on Mars!

President Obama on the phone to JPL, discussing America's pet robot.
Source: JPL.

Which is all really awesome- and I am so excited to follow Curiosity's progress as it explores! But... don't you wish it was actual people who landed on Mars last weekend? How great would that have been?

Curiosity- our very own UFO over Mars!
Source: NASA.

It turns out, we came pretty close to launching a manned mission to Mars and Venus soon after the Apollo lunar program ended- back in the late 1970s!

Illustration of a test of Apollo hardware, for a manned Venus mission.
Source: Wikipedia.

There were a few different proposals for how the mission could have proceeded. The easiest, simplest idea was a manned flyby of Venus, spending four months to travel there, zipping by the planet less than 2,000 miles above its surface, and then spending four months travelling back to Earth. 

The most ambitious idea was for a triple-planet flyby: 

- Leave Earth orbit on November 28, 1978.

- Fly by equatorial Venus, on the "day" side of the planet, on May 11, 1979.

- Fly by Mars on November 25, 1979.

- Fly by southern Venus, passing from "day" into "night" on January 29, 1980.

- Land on Earth on January 31, 1981.

The four astronauts in the crew would observe Mars and Venus as they passed by, releasing weather balloons to travel into Venus's atmosphere, and launching a swarm of probes to land on Mars.The entire mission would last 800 days. For comparison, there's one human, Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who has spent over 800 days in space. But it wasn't all at the same time- he flew six different missions. The record for the single longest duration spaceflight is held by Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who lived on the Mir Space Station for over 437 days.

But, using existing 1970s (or for that matter, 2012) propulsion technology, an 800 day trip would be necessary.

The mission profile for a triple-planet flyby, launching in 1978.
Source: Wired Science.

During a November 1978 launch window the three planets would have been aligned for relatively quick and low-energy flybys. So when the manned triple-planet flyby was cancelled, NASA took advantage of this fortuitous alignment of the planets to launch Pioneer Venus 1 and Pioneer Venus 2 instead. NASA also launched a manned space station, Skylab, using much of the Apollo technology and drawing on ideas that would have been applied to the manned triple-planet flyby.

Skylab, as viewed by a Skylab Command and Service Module.
Source: Wikipedia.

The triple-planet flyby spacecraft would have relied on Apollo technology as much as possible, along with new technology being developed for the space shuttle. One plan envisioned a Saturn V rocket (scaled up slightly) being used to launch modules into orbit 25,000 miles above Earth, to be assembled into the triple-planet flyby spacecraft. The spacecraft's operations would be powered mainly by solar panels, like Skylab was; or radioisotopes, depending on the mission duration. The spacecraft itself would be propelled towards Venus using a rocket design based on a Saturn V. Then, a rocket like that found on the Apollo command module would be used for course corrections. Once the spacecraft left Earth orbit, that command module engine would be the only propellant needed: Sir Isaac Newton takes care of the rest, slingshoting the craft from planet to planet.

Here's a mock-up of the spacecraft.

The manned triple-flyby spacecraft.
Source: Wired Science.

(A) are the "radioisotope power supply systems," which deploy outside the body of the craft after the craft arrives in Earth orbit. 

(B) is the vehicle used to re-enter Earth's atmosphere at the end of the mission (the cone on top is similar to the Apollo Command Module; attached to that is a craft similar to the Apollo service module). 

(C) is an access tunnel between the living quarters of the space ship and the re-entry vehicle and the pressurized space around it. 

(D) is the main crew quarters (located as far away as possible from the radioisotope power supply).

(E) is an emergency shelter, with radiation shielding, in the crew compartment. It would be used to protect astronauts during solar flares. The walls of the emergency shelter would consist of the crew's water supply. 

(F) is a two-man centrifuge. Engineers considered equipping the entire craft with artificial gravity (by rotating all or part of the craft) but instead, to save weight, there's just the small centrifuge.

A manned probe above Mars: what could have been and could still be!
Source: Wired Science.

The spacecraft and potential mission plans were pretty well planned out. If you'd like to read more about them, David Portree's Wired Science article After EMPIRE: Using Apollo Hardware to Explore Venus and Mars is a fascinating source. He also wrote an interesting article on NASA plans to use space shuttle hardware for a 1990s Mars mission.

Why didn't the plans for a manned Mars and Venus flyby become reality? A few different factors, including the tragic Apollo 1 fire, slowed the Apollo program down to the point where funding for such a large-scale project became unlikely. The energy spent planning the manned flyby was probably also in large part a response to fears that the USSR might try to make a manned Venus or Mars flight before the U.S. could. This of course did not come to pass. Too bad, right?

Oh well. At least there's this guy:

Curiosity, hanging out all by himself on Mars.
Source: Universe Today.

Eventually, he'll have some more friends on Mars!

Sources: Wired Science; more Wired Science; even more Wired Science; Wikipedia; JPL; Vintage Space.