Crewed Venus landing

[Beccab]

Does anyone know of crewed Venus landing proposals dating back to the 20th century? I don't think I've ever seen anything older than HAVOC, other than some NTRS docs from the 60s that were so preliminary they didn't even include a sketch of the vehicle. All I've found from the Apollo era are crewed flybys or orbiting missions, which is odd, and nothing after that for 30+ years

Note: I'm including also floating vehicles, like HAVOC, in the definition of lander, since they're much easier in the case of Venus

Edited January 17, 2023 by Beccab

[K^2]

Are we counting Soviet programs? Because there were a few. US seems to have been much more interested in Mars landing, and only used Venus to practice fly-bys due to shorter mission times with otherwise similar complexity to a Mars mission. That includes uncrewed missions that were flown and crewed missions that were only planned.

[Beccab]

Just now, K^2 said:

Are we counting Soviet programs? Because there were a few. US seems to have been much more interested in Mars landing, and only used Venus to practice fly-bys due to shorter mission times with otherwise similar complexity to a Mars mission. That includes uncrewed missions that were flown and crewed missions that were only planned.

Oh definitely if you have them, or European crewed proposals if there were any

[K^2]

7 minutes ago, Beccab said:

Oh definitely if you have them

I'm just referring to the Venera missions, with Venera 3 through 6 entering atmosphere and Venera 7 through 14 surviving to landing, returning surface data.

[Beccab]

Just now, K^2 said:

I'm just referring to the Venera missions, with Venera 3 through 6 entering atmosphere and Venera 7 through 14 surviving to landing, returning surface data.

Oh, the post is about crewed mission proposals

[K^2]

1 minute ago, Beccab said:

Oh, the post is about crewed mission proposals

Then I would point to the fate of Venera probes as to why nobody considered landing a crewed mission.

[Beccab]

4 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Then I would point to the fate of Venera probes as to why nobody considered landing a crewed mission.

Sorry but that doesn't help in any way. There were proposals for mars landers before any probe even reached it, and crewed Ganymede landers when the only data we had on the moon was from a brief Pioneer flyby around Jupiter. Same for Ceres and Deimos, which had crewed landers proposed for it decades before a single probe came close to any asteroid at all, and which are still untouched 50+ years later.

Not to mention the fact that, again, HAVOC and other proposals from the early 2000s about Venus landings exist, despite the fact that 20 years had passed since the last Venus satellite launched and we didn't have much new info in the meanwhile that made them more possible than before

[magnemoe]

1 minute ago, Beccab said:

Sorry but that doesn't help in any way. There were proposals for mars landers before any probe even reached it, and crewed Ganymede landers when the only data we had on the moon was from a brief Pioneer flyby around Jupiter. Same for Ceres and Deimos, which had crewed landers proposed for it decades before a single probe came close to any asteroid at all, and which are still untouched 50+ years later.

Not to mention the fact that, again, HAVOC and other proposals from the early 2000s about Venus landings exist, despite the fact that 20 years had passed since the last Venus satellite launched and we didn't have much new info in the meanwhile that made them more possible than before

The main problem with an manned mars mission is the long travel time and the wait for return window. More so for Ceres and bodies farther out.  Landing will be easier on smaller bodies but the low gravity is an additional problem. 

Venus shares this problems, but the surface is hot enough to melt lead and the 75 bar pressure.  And even if Venus had nice condition its still almost the same gravity as on earth so you need an earth sized rocket to get off it. Yes you could drop an blimp into the atmosphere there its not so hot. But that is still very hard compared to an Mars mission, you still need an large rocket to get off, and its pretty pointless, its nothing you need humans for in Venus atmosphere. 

Yes if I wanted to do an ultimate Venus mission I would have it manned but they would stay in orbit controlling stuff without the lightspeed lag so you could control stuff like rovers in real time to get more stuff done. 

[K^2]

6 hours ago, Beccab said:

Sorry but that doesn't help in any way. There were proposals for mars landers before any probe even reached it, and crewed Ganymede landers when the only data we had on the moon was from a brief Pioneer flyby around Jupiter. Same for Ceres and Deimos, which had crewed landers proposed for it decades before a single probe came close to any asteroid at all, and which are still untouched 50+ years later.

We knew quite a bit about Venus' atmosphere in the first half of the 20th century. The most optimistic view of it would have had a climb out of Venusian atmosphere as considerably harder than from Earth's, meaning you'd need to land at least a three stage rocket with 60s tech. Vostok's core stage alone was 100T. We got the capability to lift 100T to LEO with the Saturn V first flown in 1967. We got data from Venera 3, telling us that the ascent vehicle would have to be a lot bigger in 1965.

With the atmospheric data from Mariner and early Venera probes, the "optimistic" picture got considerably worse. It went from, "This would be very hard," to "Pretty much impossible."

If you are still dubious, I would recommend that you sit down and sketch out what a mission might be like based on the most optimistic understanding of Venus in every decade of the 20th and what was foreseeably available at the time, to see if you come up with something you'd think would be worth for someone to turn into an official document. The information we got made the most optimistic version of the mission more complex faster than we could get in the flight capabilities or technologies that would have made it easier, and that would have been very obvious to the engineers of the time.

Even today, as we're looking at what we have now, a Venusian surface landing mission would be an absolute nightmare, dwarving every other undertaking we are seriously considering. I don't think anyone is seriously considering actually flying something like this. The closest we have that we might be interested in is a high altitude balloon visit, and even that would be an exceptionally challenging mission.

[DDE]

Second from the bottom is a "compound heavy interplanetary ship with nuclear-electric propulsion to Mars/Venus". Rightmost column opposite the line for Venus spacecraft says "surface stay 0.8 years, payload 10 t". This seems to be Korolev-era and starts with those very early probes; you might also recognize the TMK in the middle.

dV = 38 km/s, IMLEO 960 tons, lander mass 410 tons.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Rightmost column opposite the line for Venus spacecraft says "surface stay 0.8 years, payload 10 t". This seems to be Korolev-era and starts with those very early probes; you might also recognize the TMK in the middle.

dV = 38 km/s, IMLEO 960 tons, lander mass 410 tons.

Yup, for early 60s, 410T lander to get 10T back up sounds about right for what would be optimistic, before we had more detailed information about surface and atmospheric conditions. Considering N-1 for the job was... a bit presumptuous, though. But that also sounds about right for Korolev and his team. I guess, you need a bit of that optimism and arrogance to push something as ambitious as a space program in the 60s.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, DDE said:

Second from the bottom is a "compound heavy interplanetary ship with nuclear-electric propulsion to Mars/Venus". Rightmost column opposite the line for Venus spacecraft says "surface stay 0.8 years, payload 10 t". This seems to be Korolev-era and starts with those very early probes; you might also recognize the TMK in the middle.

Of course, they didn't mention the Aelita project with MK-700 which had nothing to do with N1.

http://www.astronautix.com/m/mk-700.html

[DDE]

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Of course, they didn't mention the Aelita project with MK-700 which had nothing to do with N1.

http://www.astronautix.com/m/mk-700.html

Wouldn't the Aelita studies occur half a decade later than the likely date of creation of this chart?

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

But that also sounds about right for Korolev and his team. I guess, you need a bit of that optimism and arrogance to push something as ambitious as a space program in the 60s.

Only in the 1960s?

Spoiler

 

[K^2]

27 minutes ago, DDE said:

Only in the 1960s?

Doesn't seem like a fair comparison. Korolev was an engineer who actually understood the technical challenges. When he was being overly optimistic about something, it's because he believed (even if to a fault) in his own ability to solve any problem. That's very different than just promising the Moon (literally) to investors and then driving actual engineers to stress breakdowns to deliver it, whether or not it is actually remotely possible. Yes, sometimes, it really is possible, and you have the right people in place to make it happen. But if you keep doing it, these people won't stick around.

[Beccab]

7 hours ago, DDE said:

Second from the bottom is a "compound heavy interplanetary ship with nuclear-electric propulsion to Mars/Venus". Rightmost column opposite the line for Venus spacecraft says "surface stay 0.8 years, payload 10 t". This seems to be Korolev-era and starts with those very early probes; you might also recognize the TMK in the middle.

dV = 38 km/s, IMLEO 960 tons, lander mass 410 tons.

That's fantastic - heavily reminds me of the lander estimated in the common planetary modules study here, weighting 360 tons for the best case estimation. There's no design or sketch attached to it unfortunately

I assume the Soviet one in the picture also has no design/sketch/concept anything available for it right?

Btw, what's the last one of the list, a Mars vehicle?

Edited January 18, 2023 by Beccab

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Beccab said:

Btw, what's the last one of the list, a Mars vehicle?

Some sort of an alternative LRPE interplanetary vehicle.