WI: Alternate Space Exploration

Take proposed but unsuccessful space missions, whether because of rocket/spacecraft failure, lack of political will, lack of funding, or some other cause aside from physical/engineering plausibility (no Orion please, already been hashed out hundreds of times), and...WI they succeeded?

Alright, a couple from me:
Voyager: goes forward to 'bridge the gap' between Saturn and Shuttle, using one of the Saturn Vs scheduled for a late Moon mission. This is a bit of mixed bag. The projected spacecraft was not quite as capable as Viking in all aspects, but I think it's likely it will be improved, as there's only one chance at this. The larger loft weight may allow a much bigger, more capable spacecraft to be landed (and orbited), which would allow for much better science.

TOPS: The only reference I can find is an old NRC study, but basically super-Voyagers (the OTL ones). Large, RTG powered craft with a long design lifetime, substantial scientific payload, and a structure designed to be used in a Galileo-type role as well. The projected idea was to use them in the Voyager 2 Grand Tour role with (IIRC) 2 bound for Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune, 2 bound for Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus, and 2 bound for Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto. The latter especially would be nifty, as Pluto was then relatively close to the Sun and hence a probe going there could have studied the Plutonian atmosphere, and generally low-temperature atmospheric dynamics. My favorite never-flown mission, TBH. Damn budget cuts :mad:

EDIT: Ah ha, Wikipedia come through! Here is an outline of the proposed mission. 2 probes Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto, 2 Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune. Not quite as ambitious as I thought, but still my favorite canceled program.

Planetary Observers: Capable, relatively cheap inner-system exploration satellites. Between the failure of Mars Observer, the Goldin "Cheaper, faster, better" motto, and the stillbirth of SEI, they never had a chance OTL. The loss of Mar Observer (just a few days from the orbit insertion burn) was particularly devastating, setting back Mars science for literally a decade as many instruments flown on it were re-flown on the highly successful late-90s missions. Continuing on with it, a capable Moon orbiter would have been flown a few years later, possibly giving results only now beginning to come back from the armada that's visited recently, a Mercury orbiter would have been flown over a decade earlier than OTL (and that mission's success is not certain yet), and possibly other missions. A very sad thing :(

Mariner Mark II: Not really a single spacecraft, Mariner Mark II was supposed to be an overarching designator for a new class of outer-system craft. Cassini (currently in orbit around Saturn) and CRAF (Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby) would have been the first two missions. Like the Planetary Observers, killed by budget cuts, though Cassini survived. May have helped the cause of outer-system exploration by somewhat reducing costs in the design and production stage. More pertinently, CRAF might very well have provided many useful results which OTL were acquired years later about cometary and asteroidal behavior.

Pioneer H: This one would have been cool and cheap. Using Pioneer 10-11 spares, engineers had built a fully functional additional probe. They proposed using it to launch a mission which would probe the out-of-ecliptic solar system environment, something which was OTL done to some extent about a decade later with Ulysses. This one would probably have been looking more at the interplanetary environment in those areas and the solar magnetic field than the sun itself though. At least the Smithsonian got a nice display out of it.

So what are your favorites?
 
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Have probes with a standard design and interchangable parts. It'll be a sort of assembly line production of probes. That'll make them cheaper.
 
Have probes with a standard design and interchangable parts. It'll be a sort of assembly line production of probes. That'll make them cheaper.
The only two attempts at actually doing that that I know of were miserable failures. :( Mariner Mark II and Planetary Observers. (Both of which I mentioned)
 
The only two attempts at actually doing that that I know of were miserable failures. :( Mariner Mark II and Planetary Observers. (Both of which I mentioned)


I was thinking a little more on the lines of Venus Express and Mars Express from Europe. I'd like to know where every penny goes in some of these hundred million dollar probes.
 
I was thinking a little more on the lines of Venus Express and Mars Express from Europe. I'd like to know where every penny goes in some of these hundred million dollar probes.
That's actually more like the Pioneer H I mentioned, or Magellan (both of which depended heavily on spares for other probes). As regards to your cost--well, scientific instrumentation is:
a. Difficult to make. Especially when you want to launch it into orbit and have to wait years for the probe to get to where it's going.
b. A monopolists game. There aren't exactly a whole lot of companies with the expertise to build precision scientific space instruments properly, and fewer that want to. Given the very nasty things that can happen if the stuff screws up at some point (see wait, above), you can't just go somewhere else.
c. Well, rather special. See wait. See odd environment conditions. See...

Beyond that, there's launch, where the amount of fuel needed goes up exponentially with the delta v needed and rockets cost thousands of dollars per kilogram of stuff launched. So much, in fact, that it's been calculated that it would be uneconomic to ship up a kilogram of straw and turn it into a kilogram of gold. There's the cost of spacecraft design. There's the cost of actually building the thing (see above). There's the cost of ensuring radio receiver/transmitter support for the craft's lifetime. There's the cost of making sure that when you get to the mission target (especially on very long missions like anything in the outer Solar System) there are actually people to look at all the data. Frankly, there's probably corruption involved (though not much). It's amazing space missions cost as little as they do, to be honest.

EDIT: Oh, the TOPS were also designed to be multi-purpose, to cut costs. Funding cuts are the things that tend to make space probes one-offs, well that and that the first probe might massively change the rules of the game and so the design of all the subsequent ones...

(Mariner 4, for instance, showed that the atmosphere of Mars is extremely low pressure. Thus, all future landers needed to be redesigned as parachutes wouldn't be enough.)
 
Take proposed but unsuccessful space missions, whether because of rocket/spacecraft failure, lack of political will, lack of funding, or some other cause aside from physical/engineering plausibility (no Orion please, already been hashed out hundreds of times), and...WI they succeeded?


(Snip)


So what are your favorites?

I like Voyager and TOPS a lot. They're the sort of thing I had in mind when I posted my unmanned spaceflight WI.

But my favourite has to be the UR-700. Especially since it goes quite nicely with this.

So let's run with it. An alt-Soviet leadership in an alt-USSR approves Chelomei's UR-700 over the far too explody N-1. Let's further assume that the Soviet space programme is better organized than in OTL and it's a Soviet Cosmonaut (Gagarin...yes, I think what would be sweet) who plants the hammer and sickle on the moon's Oceanus Procellarum some time in 1968, before Armstrong and company can get there.

Then what?

Well, having the Soviets actually win the moon race is about the only way I can think of the keep the space race going. Especially if they really decide to exploit all the lovely heavy-lift capability the UR-700 provides and use it to build a nice-sized lunar base or two. Oh, and loft the Almaz or even the OS-1 into orbit. Can't very well cut the space budget with the commies running rampant out there, can we?

So the US decides to respond with this bad boy post Skylab. Things go forward from there.
 
As a former member of the Pioneer Project (I even have a discarded prototype of one of the quadraspherical analyzers for the plasma instrument sitting on my shelf) I like the idea of using the flight spare. But it looks just fine sitting in the Smithsonian... and to tell the truth, Ulysses had a much better instrument package for an out-of-the-ecliptic mission. About 3/4 of the Ulysses discoveries would not have happened with Pioneer, including some really important stuff about the propagation of solar flares into the outer solar system, so things worked out for the best.

My favorite AH involves the X-20 Dynasoar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-20_Dyna-Soar)-- the 2-man experimental spaceshuttle that was almost ready to fly in the 60s (!!!) before MacNamara cancelled it. I'm sure there are whole threads on craft somewhere on this forum that I have yet to discover, so forgive me if I repeat them. Imagine the possibilities:

1) We learn how to build reusable manned spacecraft cheaply, by experiment, rather than this lame Intelligent Design approach of trying to build a big sophisticated system (the Shuttle) from a clean sheet of paper without any prototypes or development.

2) We don't end up building a big multi-billion-dollar man-rated vehicle to fly cargo. Sheesh!

3) With any luck at all, we end up with a reusable manned spaceplane with a turn-around time of days that's cheaper than Soyuz. I'll take that! Without luck we end up with a reusable manned spaceplane with a turn-around time of weeks that's slightly more expensive than Soyuz. Hey, I'd be willing to settle for that too!

4) Everything happens about a decade or two sooner.


Why was it cancelled? Perhaps MacNamara was one of the agents sent by aliens to cripple our technology so they could eventually come to harvest us as food animals. This would also explain the rise in obesity over the past two decades. Just kidding! :)

Two more fun missions that never flew:

Interstellar Probe: any of a number of solar-sail-propelled missions proposed during the late 1990s for launch in this decade that would make it out to a few hundred AU in a reasonable length of time. The planning meetings were a terrific amount of fun. And that solar sail material they passed around was pretty cool.

The Solar Plunger: the name says it all! Why? Because we don't have the slightest idea what's going on close to the sun and it's getting annoying. This would be one way of finding out. Ironically one reason the mission died was power. For obvious reasons (they vaporize instantly, taking the spacecraft with them, POOF!), one cannot use solar cells. But it was impossible to sell sending a nuclear-powered mission to the sun. Oh well, the Euros will get around to it someday. Maybe they'll share some of their discoveries.
 
As a former member of the Pioneer Project (I even have a discarded prototype of one of the quadraspherical analyzers for the plasma instrument sitting on my shelf) I like the idea of using the flight spare. But it looks just fine sitting in the Smithsonian... and to tell the truth, Ulysses had a much better instrument package for an out-of-the-ecliptic mission. About 3/4 of the Ulysses discoveries would not have happened with Pioneer, including some really important stuff about the propagation of solar flares into the outer solar system, so things worked out for the best.
Cool! Do you happen to know anything else about that spare that didn't make it into the Wiki article? I knew that Pioneer 12 wouldn't be as capable as Ulysses, but I figured that since 10 and 11 both made it into hyperbolic orbits, this one would too, so it would be focused on probing the out-of-ecliptic environment of the outer solar system. Plane changes are expensive, though...
Interstellar Probe: any of a number of solar-sail-propelled missions proposed during the late 1990s for launch in this decade that would make it out to a few hundred AU in a reasonable length of time. The planning meetings were a terrific amount of fun. And that solar sail material they passed around was pretty cool.
Oh yeah, I've heard of these in old books. I wonder what caused this idea to die out? The closest I've heard of to it recently is the various Pluto-Kuiper mission ideas that eventually got launched in New Horizons.
The Solar Plunger: the name says it all! Why? Because we don't have the slightest idea what's going on close to the sun and it's getting annoying. This would be one way of finding out. Ironically one reason the mission died was power. For obvious reasons (they vaporize instantly, taking the spacecraft with them, POOF!), one cannot use solar cells. But it was impossible to sell sending a nuclear-powered mission to the sun. Oh well, the Euros will get around to it someday. Maybe they'll share some of their discoveries.
I would have thought that convincing people to send a nuclear reactor (or RTG) to the Sun would have been really easy. I mean, sending a chunk of nuclear fuel to a giant nuclear reactor. Sell it as nuclear waste disposal.
 

Archibald

Banned
Moi, moi ! :)

Mariner Jupiter Uranus, AKA Voyager 3

A third Voyager was build, and never launched. In fact it lose the budget battle against Galileo back in 1977.
Had it been launched... Voyager 2 would have gone to Pluto, after Saturn in 1981.
Voyager 3 would have explored Titan, Uranus and Neptune instead. Add two years to Voyager 2 OTL (1986 > 1988, 1989 > 1991)

Viking 3, AKA Viking 79 AKA Viking rover

As the name implies. A rover on Mars in 1979. Bonus: one of the landing sites planned was Mangalla Vallis, home of Stephen Baxter Voyage climax.

Lunar Polar Orbiter

An unmanned Apollo follow-on. The mission was accomplished in 1994 and 1998 with ooutstanding results: there's hydrogen (ammonia ? methane ? ice ? water ? no one knows to date !) at the lunar poles !
LPO had many variants, such as
- Mariner 10 backup
- The Viking 3 orbiter (!)
- a new 482 kg probe.

Manned missions ? Tons of them !

- Mercury MA-10, late 1963. Shepard was to push Mercury to its limits, but Gordon Cooper near miss plus Gemini cost overruns led to cancellation of the mission

- Voskhod 3, 1965. a bit similar: old capsule limits, new design (Soyuz) coming...

- Apollo 18 through 20, alternate lunar landing sites. Less known: Apollo I missions, where a CSM would go into a lunar polar orbit without landing. Kind of manned LPO !

- Soviets lunar landings. First with the diminutive LK, later through the bigger L3M (browse "it looks like a dirty beach" on google :) )

- Manned Venus / Mars flybys

- Von Braun Mars landing plan of 1969. Men on Mars on August, 12 1982 !

- Early Lunar Access and Athena.
Space Station Alpha / Freedom / ISS is cancelled on June 22 1993 (it was a 215-216 vote !)
Human lunar return in 2001 (Early Lunar Access), then Mars double flyby by 2010 (Athena).
 
Cool! Do you happen to know anything else about that spare that didn't make it into the Wiki article? I knew that Pioneer 12 wouldn't be as capable as Ulysses, but I figured that since 10 and 11 both made it into hyperbolic orbits, this one would too, so it would be focused on probing the out-of-ecliptic environment of the outer solar system. Plane changes are expensive, though...

I've got whole boxes-full of old manuals for the telemetry and data production for some of the instruments on Pioneer 10/11 and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Basically, the deal with the P10/11 flight spare would have been as follows.

Advantages:

1) It was just sitting around TRW, waiting to be used for something.

2) The thing was probably the most indestructible and radiation-hardened space probe ever built. The electronic used transistors (remember those?). Those were so big that charged particles could hardly touch them. The only way to take them out would have been with a machine gun :)

Disadvantages:

1) Many of the instruments had the wrong energy ranges and sensitivities... because... no one knew what these should be when the spacecraft was built. That was the whole point of the Pioneer program: to get some actual measurements so we'd know how to design the experiments on the Voyagers, Mariners, Vikings, Gallileos, Casinis, Ulysses, etc.

2) There were some important gaps in instrument coverage that we didn't know were important until we learned this from the missions themselves. In particular, the solar wind instrument couldn't detect alpha particles until... well... (shuffle feet, hang head in shame) I was the one who finally figured out how to do this, but this didn't happen until two years after the mission was over when we were trying to extend some of the Ulysses and Voyager results. And I'm still not sure all the data from some of the several superb cosmic ray experiments ever got sorted out.

3) You would not believe how primitive the spacecraft CPU was. Your digital watch has more computing power. Memory for our instrument was something like a 64-bit array of magnetic cores. I'm not talking a 64-bit chip with MB or GB of memory here... I'm talking 64... bits...

4) The spacecraft was not autonomous and required regular control passes from the Deep Space Network. No one can afford to do things like that anymore. The only reason NASA tracked it so long was that the DSN used the final years of Pioneer 10 as a technology program to develop and test improvements to the system. They did an incredible job too. In the end, they were tracking a 5 watt transmitter that was more than 0.1% of a light year away from Earth. Data rate towards the end of the mission was around 8 bps. That's 'bits per second', not 'bytes per second'. At that rate, this page would take something like an hour to load.

Oh yeah, I've heard of these in old books. I wonder what caused this idea to die out? The closest I've heard of to it recently is the various Pluto-Kuiper mission ideas that eventually got launched in New Horizons.

The big problem with the Interstellar Probe is that it even the cheapest version was an expensive mission that didn't do much of anything. Nip on out to 300 AU to check out the boundary of the heliosphere? I think that's cool, but I'm a space physicist, so that's my job, and to be honest, I must admit that a flyby of Pluto and/or a Kuiper belt object is much more exciting. There's also a problem with telemetry. Even with a 1000 watt transmitter and a 30-meter dish -- both difficult to imagine for a mission its proposed budget -- the maximum believable data rate would have been... small. And no, the solar sail wouldn't work as an antenna (good suggestion, though!) because you could never keep it in the right shape and/or point it well enough.

The Way Cool mission to send to the outer heliosphere might be a carefully designed spin-stabilized spacecraft -- you can't use thrusters for this because they'd screw up the measurements -- to see if the so-called Pioneer Anomaly is real. It probably isn't, but the Pioneer Anomaly Detection Monitor And Navigator (PACMAN, and yes, I just made that up) mission could be done for the cost of a major scifi movie ($1-200 million), and the potential payoff (e.g. "Hey, look at this, it turns out the Sun's gravity doesn't follow an inverse square law after all!") could be enormous. The Euros have considered such a mission, but I don't know if the US could afford one.
 
But my favourite has to be the UR-700. Especially since it goes quite nicely with this.

So let's run with it. An alt-Soviet leadership in an alt-USSR approves Chelomei's UR-700 over the far too explody N-1.

In '69, a UR-500 blew up over its pad rendering it useless for a year because of the particularly nasty toxic fuel involved.

The UR-700 is made up of many UR-500s.

I like Chelomei has much as the next guy, and I'd like to see someone else's (other than Korolev) rockets launch the moon mission, but it ain't going to be the UR-700.
 
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