NASA STUDY SUMMARY- "Mission Study of Manned Venus Flyby w/ Extended Apollo Hardware"

Here's a short but interesting study from 1967 on how to do a Venus flyby using a standard Saturn V single-launch to launch an uprated Apollo CSM and Mission Module to Venus for a flyby mission...

The Saturn V would launch the S-IVB/MM/CSM stack into a circular parking orbit, then reignite to insert the stack into a 2 day 70,000 nm apogee 100 nm perigee highly elliptical orbit. During the coast to apogee, the CSM would dock with and extract the MM from the spent S-IVB, extend its solar panels and communications antennas, and start up its guidance platform, and then perform a checkout of the mated vehicles, then perform a trim manuever at apogee for final checkout of the SPS and MM guidance systems. The vehicle would then coast back down to 100 nm perigee, perform another burn of the SPS on the SM to gain another 3,000 fps of velocity, which would inject the spacecraft on Trans-Venus Injection trajectory. The vehicle would have about 150 days flight time to Venus, perform the flyby, and have another roughly 150 or so days flight time along the return trajectory. The SM would have to perform three midcourse corrections outbound and another three inbound, and would reenter Earth's atmosphere at 45,000 fps, about 10,000 fps faster than most lunar return velocities, which required beefing up the heat shield, which was the biggest mod necessary to the flight hardware for this mission.

It's very interesting to me that the Apollo hardware and Saturn V were THIS capable-- one would assume that such a mission would require and in-space stage at the least to actually be capable of performing such a mission, but not so... at least not for FLYBY missions-- if one were to want to ORBIT Mars or Venus then you WOULD require a substantial in-space propulsion stage... and of course landers is another order of magnitude beyond that (not that anybody would WANT to land on Venus). This wasn't merely a stunt, either-- the vehicle could carry a substantial scientific experiment suite on the mission as well...

Truly sad how much capability died with Saturn V and Apollo...

Later! OL JR

View attachment NASA Study Summary- Preliminary Mission Study of Single Launch Venus Flyby Apollo Hardware.txt

Pic one is the mission module and CSM stack ready for TVI...


Pic two a cutaway of the same stack... VERY preliminary I'd say... looks like George C. Scott's apartment in "Dr. Strangelove" LOL


Pic three is the MM and CSM atop the Saturn V for launch... the MM took the place of the LM for the Venus mission...


Pic four is the TVI manuever plan-- enter highly elliptical 2 day orbit using the S-IVB, then do a perigee burn with the SPS in the CSM (to maximize the Oberth effect) to inject to Venus trajectory...


Pic five is the typical interplanetary trajectory that would have been followed for this mission... total trip time was 367 days for the longest mission...


Later! OL JR

Couple more shots from a more in-depth treatment of the subject of a Manned Venus Flyby mission from a Bellcomm Inc paper written the same year, apparently proposing using the "wet workshop" method to create the mission module from the S-IVB after burnout and purging the residual propellants and ullage gases from the tanks... (haven't summarized it, didn't really see the need, though I suppose I could if someone were interested in the how's/why's of the mission...

Here's the relevant snips from the study...

Pic one is the 'wet workshop" idea for the Mission Module...


Pic two is the evolutionary steps to create the 'wet workshop' module from the existing stage...


Later! OL JR