Preparing for launch.
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Project Longshot
This mission truly would have lived up to its name: a product of a late 1980s collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Navy, it involved an unmanned one-way interstellar voyage to one of the nearest stars to us, Alpha Centauri B.
Here, the science fiction quotient goes off the scale: the probe would have been powered by a fission drive based upon the Orion project, known as nuclear pulse propulsion. Essentially, the ship would be propelled forward at about 4.5 percent of the speed of light by a series of constant nuclear explosions out of the back of the ship.Traveling at that speed, the probe would reach Alpha Centauri B in just about 100 years. And any data it sent back home using a laser beam travelling at the speed of light would take a little over four years to get to Earth.
Naturally, the project was never explored beyond the conceptual stage due to the prohibitive cost of building such a large spacecraft, and concerns over sending a large payload of nuclear warheads into space.
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Orbital Space Colonies
Ever seen Mobile Suit Gundam? Or (spoilers) do you remember that American space colony at the end of Interstellar? Those were both based upon a design NASA thought about working with in the 1970s.
Also known as O’Neill Cylinders after their designer, physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Each colony was set up to spin to create gravity by centrifugal force. Also, the colonies themselves would have been capable of holding around 10,000 people each, and would be placed in stable orbits around the sun at LaGrange points just outside the moon’s orbit. They would have been created largely from materials shipped from the moon, which logically would also first require a thriving moon colony to support these cylinders’ construction.
However, technical know-how never really caught up with vision, and these space colonies never came to pass. To put things in perspective, creating the outlandish-sounding Project Longshot described above would have been a complete cakewalk compared to creating just one of these space colonies, even with modern technology.
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Mars Fly-By
For this one, we’ll dial down the ambition a bit, but only just. This mission comes out of what was known as the Apollo Applications Program, which was basically a way for NASA to get the most out of its Apollo equipment by repurposing it for things other than moon missions. Here, using favorable orbital positions in 1975, a low-consumption trajectory would bring three astronauts toward Mars long enough for them to observe it from orbit and drop some probes to take samples and collect data before slingshotting them back home again.
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Venus Fly-By
A second Apollo Applications Program mission would involve going deeper into the solar system and attempting to send humans on a flight to a deathworld closer to the Sun: Venus.
The trip, slated to launch in 1973, would take approximately a year to complete. The crew wouldn’t land on Venus, as its crushing atmospheric pressure and literal acid rain would be instantly fatal. Instead, the crew would make detailed observations of the atmosphere and planet surface from orbit, as well as observe Mercury since it would be in near alignment with Venus during the mission.
And, for bonus points, this Venus flyby could be combined with the aforementioned Mars flyby mission to take advantage of orbital positions. It would just add year and a half or so to the mission clock.
Like the Mars flyby option, this one was bypassed in favor of lower cost unmanned probe missions, as well as more politically and technically practical missions in low Earth orbit.
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GM’s Moon Lab on Wheels
Stepping back a bit to the Moon Shot days, NASA hired General Motors to create a sort of moon Cadillac large enough to hold two astronauts in comparative comfort for up to two weeks (or three astronauts for a slightly shorter amount of time).
The idea was basically to give moon explorers a mobile base with lots of equipment so they could check out the far corners of the moon more efficiently. And despite the exotic nature of the the Mobile Geological Laboratory (or MOLAB, its official designation), the engine it would have used at its core was essentially what you’d find in a stock Chevy Corvair.
Once again, cost was the main drawback and the government pulled the plug on the project by 1968. Another nail in the coffin was flagging support for a full-fledged moon base, which the MOLAB would require for logistical support. Unlike the much smaller Lunar Roving Vehicle, it was far too expensive to use once and abandon on the moon.
In addition, getting that much mass into orbit was another concern, as NASA’s supply of the huge Saturn V rockets was nearly exhausted by the late 60s.
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The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter
This one’s pretty interesting in that it may be getting a second lease on life with the newly-announced NASA project to create a probe set to head to Europa in the mid-2020s. However, that soon may change given the recent, far more optimistic indications of liquid water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, but I digress.
The JIMO probe was a product of the early 2000s and in addition to Europa, was slated to check out the other Galilean moons of Ganymede and Callisto for subsurface oceans. The craft itself would have been powered by a nuclear fission reactor, as opposed to the radioisotope thermoelectric generators current space probes are equipped with, which create electrical power by harnessing the energy released by decaying radioactive material.
The mission was ultimately canceled because of NASA’s priority shift to focusing on returning humans to the moon. Also, as seen above with Project Longshot, people weren’t exactly keen on putting a fully-functional nuclear reactor into space, either.
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Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
Fact one: You can only get the Internet on Earth. Fact two: transmitting data via radio from Mars to Earth is very slow and arduous. Conclusion: Let’s bring the Internet to Mars.
Believe it or not, NASA was planning in the early 2000s to create a satellite uplink in Mars orbit that would literally bring the data volume and speed of the Internet to an interplanetary probe mission, greatly aiding in relaying mission data. The really neat thing about the MTO would have been that it would serve as a communications hub for all current and future missions on Mars: all probes would have benefitted from increased speed and bandwidth.
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Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby
Much like the JIMO project, this one was shelved at first after it was deemed to expensive, and then revived years later with a series of separate probe missions in the 2000s.
Designed and planned during the Ronald Reagan years, CRAF was supposed to do a flyby of an asteroid and then speed on over to a comet, match its speed and course, and fly alongside it, relaying data, for three years. As they say, with great ambition comes great budgets, and the project was canceled in the mid-1990s after racking up a much larger-than-anticipated bill.
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Returning to the Moon
Since the early 1970s, no human has ever set foot on another planetary body, and those who have are rapidly dying off. It was against that grim backdrop for manned space exploration that the Bush administration set out to put a base on the moon to be completed by 2024.The plan was called the Vision for Space Exploration, and was almost immediately attacked for not focusing on further exploration of planets and moons within the solar system. Even second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin disagreed with NASA on this one, arguing for a mission to put humans on Mars instead.
Flash forward six years and one president later, and in 2010 the Obama administration decided to defund the 21st century American moon shot plan. NASA was mandated to focus its efforts instead on creating a Saturn V-type heavy lift rocket and space shuttle replacement in order to focus on a manned asteroid mission around 2025 and a human Mars landing around 2035.
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Titan Mars Explorer
This one’s particularly neat, as it would involve putting a small submarine and/or boat on the surface of Titan, one of the largest moons in the solar system and the one with the thickest atmosphere and a large amount of seas…of liquid hydrocarbons.
The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) would essentially be a buoy, dropped into one of the moon’s many large methane lakes. Its mission would have been to study the composition of the methane lakes, as well as how the liquid methane interacts with the gaseous methane in Titan’s atmosphere. Most intriguingly, TiME might have been able to provide some insights into how life could flourish in a methane-based ecology.
Unfortunately, the TiME program, like many NASA projects, was competing for its funding with a Mars lander mission and a comet rendezvous mission.
The Titan Mare Explorer failed to make the cut, and instead of a space boat mission to Titan in 2016, we’ll be seeing another Mars shot, called InSight.
However, that still purports to be plenty exciting, as InSight’s mission will be to delve further into why the Red Planet seems to be outgassing methane from underground.
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