Soviet mission to Mars

Sending people to Mars in an enormously hard task made all the more difficult by the fact that you have to bring the people back. Or do you? Mars to Stay is an organization that advocates for sending a mission to Mars that would land and make a small settlement on the planet, that would pave the way for future missions. Reading the short Wikipedia page on Mars to Stay, one of the plans(proposed by Buzz Aldrin) does raise the opportunity of putting a settlement on Mars. The downside of the proposal is obvious; the people sent to Mars would never return to Earth. This makes it difficult for the United States to ever undertake such a plan, even though Aldrin claims there would be plenty of scientist willing to make the trip despite this. The Soviet Union, however, would have had no such qualms. Putting a settlement on Mars, however small, would be an enormous prestige boost for the USSR in the Cold War. And in an ATL where the Soviet program was more successful, the mission could be technically feasible for the USSR. The lack of needing a return trip removes the main technical hurdles for the mission, and Soviet heavy-lift rockets could probably send the mission successfully on its way. Resupply could also be done periodically via heavy life rockets, although it wouldn't need a crazy amount of supplies if the base starts out small, with a four or six person team.

So how feasible is this? What would happen if the Soviet Union were to undertake such a plan? The United States would immediately feel the need to send their own mission to Mars, but how? Would the USA be willing to send their own Mars to Stay crew, and if not, could the USA actually build a spacecraft that can go to Mars and back?
 
Could the Americans have made a Mars ship? Yes, there were proposals as part of the Apollo Application Program, to see how such a mission could have worked check out Voyage by Stephen Baxter. As to a one way trip I've doubts about whether the Soviets would have done it, in This New Ocean by William Burrows there's a line about how a cosmonaut was supposed to have volunteered for such a mission in the 1960's but there's no evidence to corroborate it.

Had the Soviets embarked on such a mission I think the Americans would have waited to see if the mission was a success before deciding to respond. Sending people on such a mission raises huge ethical questions, I'm sure Stalin wouldn't have hesitated to order one but later Soviet leaders weren't as ruthless as he was.
 

Archibald

Banned
Well, in the 80's both Carl Sagan and Harrison Schmitt talked a lot about Manned Mars missions involving the soviets.
Then they differed by their respective visions.

In Schmitt vision, America had to beat the soviet to Mars, Apollo style: a cold war stunt.

Sagan, by contrast, dremt of a joint US- USSR Mars flight as the way of ending Cold War (Apollo Soyuz had somewhat helped detente in the mid- 70's).

Whatever the political opinion, in the mid-80's there were serious fears the soviets might be the first to Mars circa 2000.
After all the Soviets had Energia, a record duration flight of 326 days at Mir circa 1987, and the ill-fated Phobos probes. So...
 
Well, first assuming the USSR didn't collapse at the end of the 80's... suppose they took up Mars Direct? Or, better yet, NIMF (a CO2 nuclear rocket that could refuel from Mars' atmosphere in a couple of days)? The Soviets already had the launch vehicle (and hopefully would drop Buran for the lemon it was), and always liked nuclear power.:cool:
 
Well, first assuming the USSR didn't collapse at the end of the 80's... suppose they took up Mars Direct? Or, better yet, NIMF (a CO2 nuclear rocket that could refuel from Mars' atmosphere in a couple of days)? The Soviets already had the launch vehicle (and hopefully would drop Buran for the lemon it was), and always liked nuclear power.:cool:

Bob Zubrin born a Russian?

Well, Mars Direct is a sound plan, except for one thing: the aerobrake. From what I read, we still don't know how to efficiently land payloads much greater than 1 tonne on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin to be quite useful for aerobraking, yet too thick for a Lunar-style reentry. Zubrin's plan invoked yet-to-be-developed 'folding aerobrakes,' limited as much by Launch Vehicle Payload Faring diameter as by mass. Energia has a bit of a problem in that it's even narrower than the Shuttle External Tank, so you'd want to give it a wide payload faring while increasing payload. An NTR upper stage can help, but how much?

Other than that, the plan is mostly feasible. Provided you can sustain a crew of four on a 25-tonne spacecraft. But these problems get much simpler on a one-way flight.

I think the Soviets could be capable of it, if they ever mastered the aerobrake problems. But the political climate would have to be receptive toward such an endeavour. Kruschev liked the Soviet space program only for propaganda, and so it got less support than it might have had during his reign. Brezhnev was, well, Brezhnev. And you'd have to find some way to divorce the Soviet Space Programme from their military, which was the prime driver for the program in the first place (Almaz military space stations, Salyuts with cannons, all for the purpose of contesting the US's power in space. This military involvement culminated in Buran, which the Soviets supposedly undertook because their high-ranking generals and bureaucrats thought that the Shuttle was a sub-orbital bomber) and would like to stick to LEO.

EDIT: Ethical issues aren't really a problem, and if you looked hard enough, you could find dedicated cosmonauts willing to go to Mars for an 'extended stay.' To add to propaganda value, go for some of the original Vostok cosmonauts. Valentina Tereshkova, notably, said that she'd be willing to retire to Mars.
 
Well, first assuming the USSR didn't collapse at the end of the 80's... suppose they took up Mars Direct? Or, better yet, NIMF (a CO2 nuclear rocket that could refuel from Mars' atmosphere in a couple of days)? The Soviets already had the launch vehicle (and hopefully would drop Buran for the lemon it was), and always liked nuclear power.:cool:
I agree, delaying the collapse of the USSR might be the needed to get a Soviet Mars mission. However, preferably, any POD would also give the Soviets a better space program.

EDIT: Ethical issues aren't really a problem, and if you looked hard enough, you could find dedicated cosmonauts willing to go to Mars for an 'extended stay.' To add to propaganda value, go for some of the original Vostok cosmonauts. Valentina Tereshkova, notably, said that she'd be willing to retire to Mars.


My thoughts as well. I'm sure the USSR could find people willing and able to go to Mars, and if not, they could find some 'incentive'.
 
Bob Zubrin born a Russian?

Well, Mars Direct is a sound plan, except for one thing: the aerobrake. From what I read, we still don't know how to efficiently land payloads much greater than 1 tonne on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin to be quite useful for aerobraking, yet too thick for a Lunar-style reentry. Zubrin's plan invoked yet-to-be-developed 'folding aerobrakes,' limited as much by Launch Vehicle Payload Faring diameter as by mass. Energia has a bit of a problem in that it's even narrower than the Shuttle External Tank, so you'd want to give it a wide payload faring while increasing payload. An NTR upper stage can help, but how much?

Other than that, the plan is mostly feasible. Provided you can sustain a crew of four on a 25-tonne spacecraft. But these problems get much simpler on a one-way flight.

I think the Soviets could be capable of it, if they ever mastered the aerobrake problems. But the political climate would have to be receptive toward such an endeavour. Kruschev liked the Soviet space program only for propaganda, and so it got less support than it might have had during his reign. Brezhnev was, well, Brezhnev. And you'd have to find some way to divorce the Soviet Space Programme from their military, which was the prime driver for the program in the first place (Almaz military space stations, Salyuts with cannons, all for the purpose of contesting the US's power in space. This military involvement culminated in Buran, which the Soviets supposedly undertook because their high-ranking generals and bureaucrats thought that the Shuttle was a sub-orbital bomber) and would like to stick to LEO.

Zubrin doesn't have to be born in the USSR: they just have to read the proposal and decide it's a good idea. Especially after it's obvious the US isn't going for it.

I've always thought the aerobraking issue was just an unknown that's been seized upon by people who oppose the whole idea, like the gravity and radiation issues. By the 1990's the properties of Mars' atmosphere were reasonably well known and the theoretical feasability ought to be determinable by appropriate engineers. As for the folding aerobrakes, I thought one of the strengths of Mars Direct was that it would need much smaller ones than the much more massive Marsprojekt ship. In any case I'd hesitate to reject an idea that hasn't been tested.

Of course a program to develop and test really large Mars aerobrakes would broadcast your intentions to the world in a way that would eliminate plausible deniability should they give up later and want to do what they did to their lunar program.:rolleyes:

About improving the Soviet program earlier, from what I've read you can't have Energia without Buran. Which is unfortunate considering Buran was a bad idea copying a bad idea.:mad:
 
Well, Mars Direct is a sound plan, except for one thing: the aerobrake. From what I read, we still don't know how to efficiently land payloads much greater than 1 tonne on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin to be quite useful for aerobraking, yet too thick for a Lunar-style reentry. Zubrin's plan invoked yet-to-be-developed 'folding aerobrakes,' limited as much by Launch Vehicle Payload Faring diameter as by mass. Energia has a bit of a problem in that it's even narrower than the Shuttle External Tank, so you'd want to give it a wide payload faring while increasing payload. An NTR upper stage can help, but how much?

NTR upper helps A LOT because of that pesky exponential in the rocket equation. If you're using NIMF, too, that helps even more (no need for any chemical plants to get fuel--just a compressor and some propellant tanks).
 
NTR upper helps A LOT because of that pesky exponential in the rocket equation. If you're using NIMF, too, that helps even more (no need for any chemical plants to get fuel--just a compressor and some propellant tanks).

Ah yes, good old e power (delta-v over exhaust velocity). Reduce this value, and rocket payload increases.

Now let's say the Russians invest in an NTR and get the aerobrake to work, and design a "Direct to Mars" plan, focused on a 6-month transit time and building a base immediately upon arrival, with no crew left in orbit. They would have to commit to it around the time of the American Space Shuttle's first flight. Possible POD: Russians conclude that the STS is a poor military system, and thus don't bother with it. Instead, they develop the Energia system with a Nuclear Thermal upper stage, for applications in LEO and possible Lunar and Martian voyages.

The trick, now, is to find a way to get the attention the Russians placed on a Lunar Energia mission into a one-way Mars flight. Not too difficult, I think. Get some of their leaders to say "Mars has more easily available resources, according to the Americans and their Viking probes. And the Americans have already been to the Moon. And Mars is the Red Planet already...", basically concluding that a Mars base is a better scientific and propaganda benefit.

They'd pretty much have to be open about it, though, and that might scare them off. As Mr. Qwerty said, you can hide a Lunar program pretty easily. But the testing of a Martian aerobrake system is not something that can be covered up so easily, and all the world will be watching when/if the Soviet Mars Mission launches in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

So, they select a few of the big names of the Soviet space programme (possibly making Alexei Leonov commander of the mission) and fire them off to Mars.

How would the Americans react? Scrap the idea for Space Station Freedom and go straight to an American Mars Program?
 
Ah yes, good old e power (delta-v over exhaust velocity). Reduce this value, and rocket payload increases.

Now let's say the Russians invest in an NTR and get the aerobrake to work, and design a "Direct to Mars" plan, focused on a 6-month transit time and building a base immediately upon arrival, with no crew left in orbit. They would have to commit to it around the time of the American Space Shuttle's first flight. Possible POD: Russians conclude that the STS is a poor military system, and thus don't bother with it. Instead, they develop the Energia system with a Nuclear Thermal upper stage, for applications in LEO and possible Lunar and Martian voyages.

The trick, now, is to find a way to get the attention the Russians placed on a Lunar Energia mission into a one-way Mars flight. Not too difficult, I think. Get some of their leaders to say "Mars has more easily available resources, according to the Americans and their Viking probes. And the Americans have already been to the Moon. And Mars is the Red Planet already...", basically concluding that a Mars base is a better scientific and propaganda benefit.

They'd pretty much have to be open about it, though, and that might scare them off. As Mr. Qwerty said, you can hide a Lunar program pretty easily. But the testing of a Martian aerobrake system is not something that can be covered up so easily, and all the world will be watching when/if the Soviet Mars Mission launches in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

So, they select a few of the big names of the Soviet space programme (possibly making Alexei Leonov commander of the mission) and fire them off to Mars.

How would the Americans react? Scrap the idea for Space Station Freedom and go straight to an American Mars Program?

Good POD, and I'd think America would have to go for a Mars Program. The Moon is great and all, but being the first to Mars is a huge propaganda victory. Failing to get to Mars first, I'd imagine that the USA would come up with another program to try and top the USSR, like a Moon base.

Another result of this POD is the use of a nuclear thermal rocket--that would create interesting butterflies, as I assume that many would be opposed to the use of such a system anywhere due to the possibility for disaster. But the USA could see it as a way to get their own large ship to Mars. And any actual disaster with the rocket brings up another host of butterflies....
 
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