With all the talk of manned Mars missions by Elon Musk and SpaceX and
more recently NASA it's easy to forget that Mars isn't a recent obsession now
before we get into the details, this video is a little different because this
is my first collaboration and part two of this series will be done by Isaac
Arthur who will be looking at the Mars missions from the roots of sci-fi in the
1990s to those which are proposed for the coming decades there's a link in the
description that will take you there directly and if you've come over from
Isaac's channel, welcome to curious droid and the first part of the manned
Mars missions that were planned for the post Apollo period but never got off the
ground and I hope you can take a little time to have a look around this channel
and also some of you have our videos and hopefully like and subscribe. Now if you
haven't heard or seen Isaac's channel then I recommend you hop on over there
after you've watched this of course because this is a kind of sets up for his
video but his channel deals with the science and futurism and covers a whole
load of things that I've never even thought of
but I found highly informative and very entertaining, well worth a visit if you
like your futurism on the grand scale. Ever since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky,
Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Robert Esnault-Pelterie discovered the
principles of rocketry and Astronautics in the early twentieth century we've been
planning on going to Mars though back then it was much more of an academic
issue with a large dose of science fiction but with the development of a V2
rocket led by Verna von Braun whilst he was working for Germans in the 1940s the
possibility of space travel became a reality. By 1948 when Von Braun was
working for the US developing its rocket capability he'd published a book called
the Mars Project, this has become probably the most influential book on
the subject of manned Mars missions even though it was a rather grandiose scheme
which called for a fleet of 10 spacecraft carrying 70 or more people.
Von Braun used the idea that if Columbus had set off to find the new world with
just a single ship and he would probably have never made it back to Spain.
Although his book was looked upon as Sci-fi by some, von braun provided detailed
calculations to support his theories and many of the ideas he put forward like
reusable shuttles, orbital assembly and multiple spacecraft have greatly
influenced nasa's long-term plans for manned interplanetary missions even if
they have been greatly cut down in scale. He also covered the main problems of
getting men to Mars, such as the effect of weightlessness on the human body,
radiation from a Sun and cosmic rays, using spacesuits to move from one ship
to another if one were to be disabled and also the psychological effects of
having people live in enclosed space for long periods of time.
Back in the 1950s and 60s there was still the belief that if you're going to
go and do a space mission when you go big. Just like Apollo was a huge effort
employing around 400,000 people the Mars proposals from both the US and the
Soviets were equally large especially when national pride was at stake and the
spin-off was a range of new advanced weapons. In the Soviet Union their answer
of Saturn 5, the ill-fated N1 rocket had actually been designed by Sergey
Korolyov in the 1950s to launch a manned Mars mission. The first serious Mars
planning done by the Soviets was headed by Mikhail Tikhonravov In 1956 and was
known as the MPK or Martian Piloted Complex. This would have a crew on a
30-month mission to land on the Martian surface and stay there for just over a
year before returning. There were even plans for a nuclear-powered Mars train
to be made up of five modules which would travel across the Martian surface.
By 1959 a group within the OKB-1 design bureau had started development of an
interplanetary spacecraft called the TMK which was to carry a three-man crew for
a Mars flyby and drop remote control Landers to the surface. A launch date was
penciled in for June 8th 1971 and returning to Earth
over three years later. To overcome the effects of weightlessness it was
proposed that the TMK would rotate about its axis to create a form of artificial
gravity a bit like the space station in the film 2001, however because of its
small diameter the Coriolis forces created could have induced nausea which
would have been worse than the weightlessness itself. Radiation was
still an unknown quantity but with data from unmanned probes it was thought that
the cumulative radiation dose for a return mission to Mars would have been
within safe levels but that didn't account for solar flares this was to be
addressed by having a radiation shelter which was a shielded tube in the center
of a craft with simplified instruments and controls. Even as far back as the
1950s it was realized that chemical rockets were just on the verge of
feasibility when trying to get a manned mission to Mars and back again and that
nuclear on the other hand would provide greater power with much lower mass
making for significantly shorter transit times and the secondary abilities to
generate electrical power once at Mars. In 1954 Ernst Stuhlinger who was working
on Von Braun's team became interested in electrical propulsion after reviewing a
paper on a subject by Herman J. Oberth. Stuhlinger believed that a spacecraft
could be designed that would give greater thrust than a chemical rocket if
it's set off from orbit. The nuclear electric engine became the
interplanetary propulsion system favored by the Soviet chief designer Sergey
Korolev, basically a nuclear reactor creating electricity to drive a plasma
ion thruster. By 1962 in the U.S. NASA commissioned the project EMPIRE studies
to look into the human exploration of Mars and what would be required. Three
companies were involved Ford's aeronautic division, General Dynamics and
Lockheed missiles of space. Ford suggested a dual flyby of both Venus and
then onto Mars by launching and arriving relative to Mars at the midpoint of the
to planetary trajectory, a sort of planetary double-whammy. They suggested
using either a Saturn 5, nova or supernova rockets to launch into orbit
and then the nuclear injection stage and chemical rocket maneuvering. The whole
mission would last around 21 months and cost $12.6 Billion around
about $100 billion in todays money plus the cost of launch vehicle development.
General Dynamics suggested just a Mars mission with a crew of around about
eight and again using a Saturn V and nerva nuclear engine option. They said
that with nuclear engines and an optimal launch date of 1973 to 75 when Mars
would be at its closest approach the whole mission could be reduced to
400-450 days including a 30-50 day stay in
the Martian orbit with a possible landing and sample return. The team said
that it would require 8 Saturn Vs to assemble a Mars mission vehicle and
would have a payload around 450 tons. Their proposal would be over a
ten-year period from 1965 to 1975 and cost $24.5 billion $196
billion in today's money. Lockheed proposal was for a mission to
Mars that would last 670 days for up to a crew of 12 and will
be a precursor to later missions that would land on the Martian surface. Again
it would use for Saturn V nuclear Nerva propulsion combination but one
interesting difference here was that the team suggested that a craft rotating at
three revolutions per minute could generate 0.4g of gravity
during the interplanetary phase to help offset the effect of weightlessness
pretty much like with TMK in the russian solution. Although none of the Empire
missions moved beyond the initial design phase, it was the first time since the
Mars project that detailed proposals were carried out and shared with the
rest of a space community, this in time would convince many in NASA that manned
missions to Mars were feasible. By 1969 Von Braun had been refining his own
ideas for Mars. His final plans had two ships each with
a six-man crew and would fly in a convoy with the entire setup apart from the
Mars Lander being able to be reusable for future missions. After the first moon
landings there was a brief enthusiasm for more
manned spaceflight Von Braun proposed his vision of a manned Mars mission as
part of a post apollo integrated plan which included a manned shuttle in its
original form by 1975, space stations there after, plus continued development of
a saturn V as the launch stage and the Nerva nuclear thermal upper stage for
the interplanetary part of the journey. The beauty of this setup was that the
proven space station modules would be used as the living quarters for the Mars
missions, the Saturn V was by now a well proven way to get the main parts into
orbit and the nerva nuclear engine had been tested and was ready to be put into
space. The only new hardware required would be the Mars Lander. Testing was
envisaged starting in 1978 with the first Mars mission in 1982. The shuttle
would be used to refurbish the Mars crafting space with further missions
planned for 1983, 86 and 88 with a 50-person Mars base by 1989. however as
we know things didn't go according to plan there was resistance from senior
figures within NASA to manned missions beyond the moon. By the early 1970s the
public's interesting space had, waned the war in Vietnam was like a political
albatross around the neck of the US government and was costing a fortune.
There was little public appetite for more hugely expensive space missions,
studies put the cost of a Mars mission between $12 and $32 billion or between $93
and $250 billion in today's money. Mars was seen as a dead and pretty
uninteresting place which was confirmed rather ironically by the Mariner 7 flyby
the day after Von Braun's big 1969 Mars presentation to NASA. With a
change of administration in 1972 and even with vice president Spiro Agnew's
endorsement of a Mars mission, Nixon slashed NASA's budget and the only thing
left of a post Apollo plan was the much repurposed Space Shuttle and the
leftover Saturn V rockets which were used for the Skylab space station. The nerva
nuclear engine which was so reliant upon the post Apollo plan was also scrapped.
In the Soviet Union the failure to produce a workable N1 rocket and with
similar economic issues to the US the Soviet Mars projects were also shelved
indefinitely with the development of the N1's replacement the giant Energia
rocket in the mid 1970s and 80s and the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran there was a
brief flurry of interest in Mars missions once more but after the
collapse of a Soviet Union both the Energia rocket and the remaining ideas for
Mars missions were also shelved. Although there were successful robotic missions
to Mars in the following decades interest in manned missions in the 1980s
and 90s was limited to the die-hard planetary scientists and enthusiasts.
Even sci-fi gave up on Mars during this time as it slipped from much of a
public's consciousness and this is where our part one of the story ends and we
hand you over to Isaacs SFIA channel for part two of the series. However we
aren't quite done yet the logistics of planning a mission as complex as sending
men to Mars back in the day where most of the working out was done with a slide
rule is truly amazing just like Apollo it would have been a
massive undertaking bringing together thousands of scientists engineers and
mathematicians and is truly incredible to imagine the full complexity of the
operation. To begin to get a grasp of how these things working in the trenches
you might start small for instance how fast must we launch an object from the
surface of the earth to get into space you can look up the answer if you want
but if you like me you want to create things yourself. Our sponsor for this
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