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Here's a curiosity--the cover story of the June 11, 1981 issue of Analog. It wasn't fiction. "Mars in 1995!" by Bob Parkinson, with illustrations by David A. Hardy, was a sober explanation of how a manned mission to Mars would be feasible, only 14 years after that issue of the magazine came out. And though it didn't happen, many of the details of the imagined project showed up in subsequent robotic missions.
For me, the most interesting part of the article is a bit of background presented close to the beginning:
In 1970, at the height of its success with Apollo, NASA outlined its plans for a manned expedition to Mars before the end of the century. That was the pessimistic scenario--actually, they hoped that the first expedition would take place around 1987.
Alas, such plans required nuclear boosters, which for complicated reasons never came about.
Perhaps this was just as well. We know a lot more about the long-term effects of living in space than we did in 1981, and it looks like such a voyage might require medical interventions that don't yet exist.
Still... The article is a glimpse back into a more optimistic era. Here's what Parkinson had to say about what the pessimists expected:
There are many in the space business who imagine that such an expedition belongs to the twenty-first century. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, they say, we may just be returning to the moon.
Thirty years later, we haven't yet done that either.
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1 comment:
OK, here's something else we haven't done:
1. Venus does not have a magnetic field. To have one, it'd need a spinning, molten iron core.
OK, crash 16-Psyche, a large nickel-iron asteroid dead center into it, with enough velocity to puncture and cause a massive heat reaction.
2. Start dragging large asteroids into a solar orbit that will cause them to:
a. coalesce into a single loose but large mass.
b. (this is the clever/tricky part) swing past Europa with enough inertia and gravitic pull to nudge Europa out of Jupiter's orbit into a decaying solar orbit.
3. Using the coalesced asteroid gravity tractor, nudge europa into an orbit that swings past Venus in such a way to gradually drag it out to an orbit at 1AU (earth's orbit) diametrically opposite Earth in our orbit around the sun.
4. Gently crash Europa into Venus. This will give Venus liquid water and raise its mass to 89% of Earth's mass.
5. Add more and more asteroids onto the coalesced asteroid tractor until it reaches roughly 89% of the Moon's mass. Then park it in orbit around Venus at roughly the same orbit as our Moon around Earth.
6. Seed the hell out of Venus with algae and such that will absorb the CO2 and sulfur from the atmosphere and excrete O2.
8. Wait a few millennia for the surface to cool and the atmosphere to stabilize and move in.
Of course, it might be a lot easier to terraform Earth back into a habitable planet.
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