Was a Manned Mars mission in 1982 feasible?

[uk 75]

The political and financial answers to this question were dealt with here
.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/space-1975-could-von-brauns-vision-have-worked.32299/page-2

What I really wanted to know and still do, was could it have been done technically? or was it just too complex?

For those who still want politics the original thread is still open. Please be technical

 

[Archibald]

NASA was highly motivated for sure. At least before September 1969 when Nixon poured very cold water on them.

Was it doable technically ? Hard to say at least 100% sure.

The biggest difficulties would have been

a) astronauts health across the entire trip - and after (zero-G, radiations)
The crew module would have used an aluminum tin can not unlike Skylab. Problem is, this is a very bad protection against solar flares. Well radiation might actually ricochet all over the inside of the module, doing no good to the crew. Inflatable modules with water would be far better.

b) designing a MEM that could land on Mars rather than crash.

Mars and its atmosphere are massive b*tches.
The very thin atmosphere fluctuates a lot, and half the planet is three kilometers lower than the other. And this is a giant PITA because it brings a lot of variations into the "8 minutes of terror" - the final result being either a gentle touchdown or a crash at supersonic velocities into the solid ground. Also - parachutes have to open at supersonic velocity. The retro-rockets have to fire at a very precise moment. Contrary to a rumor, an Apollo capsule shape for the MEM might not do the job.

Whatever. Stephen Baxter Voyage gives a good idea about the whole thing.

 

[edwest4]

It was very doable. There were no technical issues. The primary problems were food and spare parts. Astronaut endurance would be tested but a large enough area for exercise equipment would have helped. Remember that an Apollo capsule was launched along with a service module that contained a lunar lander, and a lunar rover. Though tests were carried out, this had never been done till then. It worked. Due to the higher gravity on Mars, more propellant for landing and takeoff would be required. It appears that cost and a diversion of funds to other things prevented moving forward.

 

[TJDougherty01]

One technical issue that remains today is the long term exposure to radiation from the cosmos. The ISS is partially protected by the magnetic field deflecting charged particles. That would not be true on a voyage to Mars. And no protection on the Martian surface either. There are also indications from the ISS that long term lack of gravity had impacts on the body, even with exercise.

Unfortunately I don't see those issues being addressed in the SpaceX Mars plans, nor the fact that the Martian surface is the relatively high levels of perchlorate: Mars perchlorate. In any Mars colonization effort, the various (& enormously varied) microbes and other organisms (e.g. nematodes, worms) that turn over soil would have to be added to any Martian agricultural effort to renew the soil environment.

 

[Byeman]

It was very doable. There were no technical issues. The primary problems were food and spare parts. Astronaut endurance would be tested but a large enough area for exercise equipment would have helped. Remember that an Apollo capsule was launched along with a service module that contained a lunar lander, and a lunar rover. Though tests were carried out, this had never been done till then. It worked. Due to the higher gravity on Mars, more propellant for landing and takeoff would be required. It appears that cost and a diversion of funds to other things prevented moving forward.

wrong. Long term life support system was an issue. Reliability wasn't there. The mission was going to be over 600 days.

Remember that an Apollo capsule was launched along with a service module that contained a lunar lander, and a lunar rover. Though tests were carried out, this had never been done till then. It worked.

Huh. The lander was flown 3 times before the first landing. 2 in earth orbit and one in lunar orbit. The rover wasn't used until the last 3 landings

Due to the higher gravity on Mars, more propellant for landing and takeoff would be required.

No, less would be required for landing since aerobraking would have been used.

It appears that cost and a diversion of funds to other things prevented moving forward.

Never was in the plans of the US govt.

 

[Justo Miranda]

We have not yet developed effective radiation protection or an artificial rotational gravity system, nor a safe landing system, nor a safe CO2 removal system away from terrestrial supplies, nor a good reason to go and stay there for a year without help.

There will always be a politician who decides to include the trip to Mars among the many promises he does not intend to keep.

Maybe a businessman can get it but he should be ten times richer than Elon.

Is it worth it?

 

[Yellow Palace]

Long term life support system was an issue.

This is where it falls down, IMO.

The other issues have potential solutions, or can at least be ignored with sufficiently optimistic assumptions. The astronauts may well suffer health consequences later in life as a result. They'll almost certainly never fly in space again after a Mars mission.

But the life support thing... can a decade of concentrated effort produce a system that can reliably last for the required duration? I don't know. It's probably unknowable. But if it can't, the whole project is on a hiding to nothing.

 

[Scott Kenny]

This is where it falls down, IMO.

The other issues have potential solutions, or can at least be ignored with sufficiently optimistic assumptions. The astronauts may well suffer health consequences later in life as a result. They'll almost certainly never fly in space again after a Mars mission.

But the life support thing... can a decade of concentrated effort produce a system that can reliably last for the required duration? I don't know. It's probably unknowable. But if it can't, the whole project is on a hiding to nothing.

I believe so.

Submarines have one that works, but I don't know how well it would work in zero gee. (IIRC the CO burners need gravity to work properly, and then there's the Monoethyl Amine to absorb CO2)

 

[Justo Miranda]

Zero G???

 

[Yellow Palace]

Submarines have one that works, but I don't know how well it would work in zero gee. (IIRC the CO burners need gravity to work properly, and then there's the Monoethyl Amine to absorb CO2)

The submarine use case is very different from the deep space use case, and microgravity is the least of your worries. No access to seawater for hygiene purposes or making air, no way to 'surface' even in the direst emergency, no possibility of resupply for approximately two years.

 

[Michel Van]

We have not yet developed effective radiation protection or an artificial rotational gravity system, nor a safe landing system, nor a safe CO2 removal system away from terrestrial supplies, nor a good reason to go and stay there for a year without help.

There will always be a politician who decides to include the trip to Mars among the many promises he does not intend to keep.

Maybe a businessman can get it but he should be ten times richer than Elon.

Is it worth it?

Skylab used a reusable CO2 molecular filter, it need regular venting in vacuum.
on radiation there already studies in 1960s to deal with matter there solutions was simple
arrange equipment and the water tanks, so it serve as radiation shield.
even to use urine to fill the empty water tanks...

The program need series of space station to test systems, so several Skylabs could be launch.
leading to permanent US space station in orbit in 1970s
also to study how long time stay in space affect the Astronauts

Politic is important step in program: no bucks, no Buck Rogers
had the soviets landen a cosmonaut on Moon during Apollo, in 1980s would US land Astronaut on Mars.

is it worth ?
that depends what they find there...

 

[FighterJock]

Wernher Von Braun at the time of Apollo always thought that 1982 was a good time to go to Mars using a modified Saturn V rocket powered by nuclear propulsion. After all when President Kennedy made his now famous speach which included the line and do the other things, that other thing was Mars.

 

[Justo Miranda]

Skylab used a reusable CO2 molecular filter, it need regular venting in vacuum.
on radiation there already studies in 1960s to deal with matter there solutions was simple
arrange equipment and the water tanks, so it serve as radiation shield.
even to use urine to fill the empty water tanks...

The program need series of space station to test systems, so several Skylabs could be launch.
leading to permanent US space station in orbit in 1970s
also to study how long time stay in space affect the Astronauts

Politic is important step in program: no bucks, no Buck Rogers
had the soviets landen a cosmonaut on Moon during Apollo, in 1980s would US land Astronaut on Mars.

is it worth ?
that depends what they find there...

They will find a world that has been dead for a long time, without a magnetic field because its core suffered an apocalyptic impact that cracked the planet's crust and created the largest volcanoes in the solar system, an abrasive and toxic soil that will render useless equipment, useless for agriculture, a carcinogenic radiation that does not allow life on the surface, danger of meteoric impacts due to the poor protection of the atmosphere.

Would you spend tens of billions to hear some guys die from millions of miles away helplessly?

What can a human do that a robot can't do for much less money and without any risk? … Step on some red sand and nail a flag?

Does science need answers? ...then let's send Robby to find them, to dig and analyze them for years and send us the data like extrasolar probes do.

 

[Archibald]

The two possible landing dates would have been
- August 15, 1982 ( von Braun 1969)
- April 5, 1986 (S. Baxter, Voyage)

 

[FighterJock]

I would have preferred the August 15th 1982 Von Braun Mars mission that would have been quicker than the Stephen Baxter 1986 mission, although I can remember reading Stephen Baxter's Voyage when I was younger when I first started reading Science Fiction.

 

[Byeman]

nor a safe CO2 removal system away from terrestrial supplies,

That exists and was used on Skylab, ISS and shuttle.

 

[Justo Miranda]

That exists and was used on Skylab, ISS and shuttle.

This is a system that cannot fail or be repaired for almost two years

 

[Yellow Palace]

two possible landing dates would have been
- August 15, 1982 ( von Braun 1969)
- April 5, 1986 (S. Baxter, Voyage)

Plenty more possible dates than that, depending on the trajectory chosen. The Boeing IMIS study identified something in excess of a dozen launch opportunities, though the reference points were a May 1983 Venus orbital mission and a March 1986 opposition-class Mars mission, which would result in a landing date in September or October that year. Surface stay time would be 30 days within a 40 day duration in Mars orbit.

The IMIS study is back up on NTRS in full. Here's the summary report, you can easily find the other volumes from there:

Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft Concept Definition. Volume 1 - Summary Final Report - NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

All nuclear space acceleration system and basic spacecraft consisting of biconic earth entry module, mission module, vehicle control, experiment laboratories, and excursion module

ntrs.nasa.gov

While it's certainly a product of its time, it does give a view of what a crewed Mars (or Venus) mission was expected to look like in 1968. And it goes some way toward identifying the necessary technology development needed, along with the cost and timescale. Estimated cost for the two-mission programme (Venus '83 and Mars '86) was $29 billion.

For what it's worth, mission success probability for this type of mission was later (i.e. in the 2000s) estimated at less than 10%. Loss of crew was estimated at in excess of 50%. Not because a crewed Mars mission is fundamentally impossible, but because the technology just wasn't there yet.

 

[Byeman]

This is a system that cannot fail or be repaired for almost two years

It is an easy system to add redundancy to. It lasted one year on Skylab.

 

[Justo Miranda]

It is an easy system to add redundancy to. It lasted one year on Skylab.

The Apollo system was also easy, until all failed.

 

[Dilandu]

What I really wanted to know and still do, was could it have been done technically? or was it just too complex?

To put it simply: no. Without the long-term missions of Mir and ISS, it would be impossible to predict and plan for all variables of multi-year Martian flight.

 

[Yellow Palace]

To put it simply: no. Without the long-term missions of Mir and ISS, it would be impossible to predict and plan for all variables of multi-year Martian flight.

Which is of course why programmes involving a Mars flight in the 1980s envisaged a lot of long-term Earth orbital (and lunar!) experience being developed in the 1970s.

They may have been overly optimistic, but they weren't totally devoid of common sense.

 

[Rhinocrates]

I believe so.

Submarines have one that works, but I don't know how well it would work in zero gee. (IIRC the CO burners need gravity to work properly, and then there's the Monoethyl Amine to absorb CO2)

Footnote, for amusement.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU&ab_channel=xkcd%27sWhatIf%3F

 

[edwest4]

We have not yet developed effective radiation protection or an artificial rotational gravity system, nor a safe landing system, nor a safe CO2 removal system away from terrestrial supplies, nor a good reason to go and stay there for a year without help.

There will always be a politician who decides to include the trip to Mars among the many promises he does not intend to keep.

Maybe a businessman can get it but he should be ten times richer than Elon.

Is it worth it?

If man wants to "go to the stars" then Elon will finance at least the first trip to Mars. All of the technology exists to get to Mars. Aside from Elon, no one wants to pay for it. The decision to go to the Moon was financed and the technology developed. The London Times was skeptical when President Kennedy announced the program and they did not think it could be done by the end of the decade. When the landing was made, they congratulated "our American friends on a job well done."

 

[scautomoton]

The Apollo system was also easy, until all failed.

If you're on about Apollo 13 the system didn't fail, it was overloaded by a use case it wasn't designed for. And then the Engineers rallied and solved the problem.

 

[Byeman]

The Apollo system was also easy, until all failed.

Huh? It never failed. But it depended on consumable canisters, which was not even close to the same thing as Skylab's.

 

[Scott Kenny]

The submarine use case is very different from the deep space use case, and microgravity is the least of your worries. No access to seawater for hygiene purposes or making air, no way to 'surface' even in the direst emergency, no possibility of resupply for approximately two years.

But the amine scrubber, CO/H2 burner and electrostatic precipitator all work on a continuous loop process.

And the burner makes water. Plus all the water breathed out and sweat out that condenses from the AC evaporator coils.

You can choose to push the hydrogen made by splitting water out into the engine or save it to run in the burner to make water again.

You would need to haul a significant amount of water with you for hygiene and making oxygen. It'd also serve as a radiation shield, but you're still talking thousands of tonnes of water.

 

[Justo Miranda]

Huh? It never failed. But it depended on consumable canisters, which was not even close to the same thing as Skylab's.

It did not occur to anyone that it might be necessary to use the command module's absorbent cartridges in the lunar module. I mean those kinds of design problems. Next time there may not be a brilliant engineer who will find a solution.

 

[Scott Kenny]

It did not occur to anyone that it might be necessary to use the command module's absorbent cartridges in the lunar module. I mean those kinds of design problems. Next time there may not be a brilliant engineer who will find a solution.

But there will be a couple rolls of duck tape.

 

[Justo Miranda]

How many spare parts does a spacecraft made up of billions of parts need to function perfectly for one or two years? Some will be able to be printed on board, others will not.

What happens to the bacteria that live in recycling systems and thermal coatings when they are exposed to a lot of radiation for thirty months?

What happens to the fossil orbits of ancient comets containing trillions of kinetic projectiles... do we know them all? Will the ship's trajectory be able to avoid them?

Well, that's just the classic dangers... What about strangers? Will astronauts have to improvise if they start to go crazy or go blind all at once?

 

[Justo Miranda]

If you're on about Apollo 13 the system didn't fail, it was overloaded by a use case it wasn't designed for. And then the Engineers rallied and solved the problem.

If that happened on a week-long flight with Newton's guaranteed return trajectory... that it can happen when something serious happens far from all help?... improvise like the Ironman crew?

 

[Justo Miranda]

But there will be a couple rolls of duck tape.

Columbus took huge risks with his three toy ships and got lucky, but a monster like the Titanic built four hundred years later still wasn't good enough for the job. The crew of Apollo XIII were lucky, but others were not. Nowadays we continue to lose ships and planes without knowing the causes in many cases. Our technology is not good enough yet.

 

[chimeric oncogene]

My impression is that with continued high levels of funding (probably higher than the projections), and a tolerance for risk, it would have been quite possible.

The life support systems were not there in 1970, but they would have had a whole decade to develop, test, and iterate. The Mars Program was not a standalone thing - the IPP called for a LEO space station plus propellant depot, HEO and lunar orbiting stations, and other infrastructure, as well as STS and a lunar tug, all of which would have required long-duration life support systems, radiation protection outside Earth's magnetosphere, and long-duration microgravity exposure. On a side note, thousands of tonnes of water is ridiculous; you'd have a water recycling system set up. There were lots of ideas for that being worked on through the decades.

Plans called for something along the lines of a 50-man space base in LEO and a 12-man space base in lunar orbit - that's significantly more man-hours of microgravity exposure over a decade than the ISS has given us over two to three decades.

Would it have been uneconomical, astronomically expensive, and possibly pointless (depending on philosophy) in terms of blood and treasure spent (and I mean blood, a few deaths along the way are probable)? Yeah.

Would there have been a catastrophe some point along the program resulting in a three or six year delay? Probably.

But I suspect it would have gotten to Mars in the end.

 

[scautomoton]

If that happened on a week-long flight with Newton's guaranteed return trajectory... that it can happen when something serious happens far from all help?... improvise like the Ironman crew?

Agreed, but, strictly speaking it was not a system failure, it was an unforeseen use case meaning the hardware was operating outside of its design envelope. It was actually a failure early on in the program to identify and generate comprehensive requirements to drive the design. This is what DFMEAs are for, which when done correctly (should) cover all eventualities.

 

[Archibald]

But there will be a couple rolls of duck tape.

NASA "Ok Mark, you can start drilling."

Watney "That what she said."

NASA "Seriously Mark ? "

 

[Yellow Palace]

My impression is that with continued high levels of funding (probably higher than the projections), and a tolerance for risk, it would have been quite possible.

I think people are confusing the unrealistic expectations of the Integrated Program Plan around funding and risk appetite with unrealistic engineering. Quite the contrary. A lot of engineering hours clearly went into it. It was felt to be technically feasible by a bunch of engineers. But those engineers failed to recognise that Apollo's level of national support wasn't going to be sustained through to the end of the Apollo programme, much less for several more decades.

I'll say again: the IMIS report - and the whole thing runs to nearly 2,000 pages - is a deadly serious engineering study down to subsystem and major component level. You don't spend those hours without a serious expectation that you'll be using the results. You can (and should) question the methodology and results. Thinking had changed even by the next year about how a Mars mission could be carried out. But it shows that all the issues identified in this thread were already being thought about, including paths to a solution, in 1968.

 

[Byeman]

It did not occur to anyone that it might be necessary to use the command module's absorbent cartridges in the lunar module. I mean those kinds of design problems. Next time there may not be a brilliant engineer who will find a solution.

It did and that was the fix.

 

[Byeman]

How many spare parts does a spacecraft made up of billions of parts need to function perfectly for one or two years? Some will be able to be printed on board, others will not.

We have satellites that have worked decades without human touch. Redundancy is one of concepts that will enable this.

What happens to the bacteria that live in recycling systems and thermal coatings when they are exposed to a lot of radiation for thirty months?

What bacteria? Two years can be done with just chemical recycling.
Thermal coatings? Again, spacecraft have operated for decades.

What happens to the fossil orbits of ancient comets containing trillions of kinetic projectiles... do we know them all? Will the ship's trajectory be able to avoid them?

Huh? Has this been a problem for the 100 or so planetary missions in the past?

 

[Byeman]

Columbus took huge risks with his three toy ships and got lucky, but a monster like the Titanic built four hundred years later still wasn't good enough for the job. The crew of Apollo XIII were lucky, but others were not. Nowadays we continue to lose ships and planes without knowing the causes in many cases. Our technology is not good enough yet.

That would be wrong. Technology is fine. It could be done like Columbus, with 3 spacecraft flying at 33-67% capacity.

 

[Justo Miranda]

We have satellites that have worked decades without human touch. Redundancy is one of concepts that will enable this.

What bacteria? Two years can be done with just chemical recycling.
Thermal coatings? Again, spacecraft have operated for decades.

Huh? Has this been a problem for the 100 or so planetary missions in the past?

If you plan to travel to Mars you should be better informed





https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-022-01293-0

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-fa...ce/ames-space-biosciences/microbial-tracking/

https://english.elpais.com/science-...ugs-pose-a-threat-to-human-life-in-space.html

https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/news/rogue-microbes-iss/

https://www.quora.com/If-comets-are...-dont-they-disappear-through-loss-of-material

https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Astronomy__Cosmology/Astronomy_1e_(OpenStax)/13:_Comets_and_Asteroids_-_Debris_of_the_Solar_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome