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Old 02-12-2019, 08:47 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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On YouTube (the link is below), there is a short "filmized" (an actual term in TV and cinema work, for making taped or digital-camera video look like it was shot on film) video of what the on-board and window views from a Saturn V-launched, manned Mars flyby spaceship would have looked like. Such missions would have utilized a slightly modified Apollo spacecraft (a Service Module fitted with *two* engines [LEM Descent Engines, if memory serves] was preferred, for redundancy), docked to a new, truncated-cone habitation module that was to be permanently affixed to the top of the Saturn V's S-IVB third stage, inside the standard jettisonable SLA panels that were used for the Apollo lunar missions. Such manned missions--which were intended to fly by Mars or Venus (and even ^both^ planets on the same flight, with a December 1978 launch window)--were also, in some versions, intended to carry robotic landers, and:

I don't know whether the creator of this 3 minute, 16 second video (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNyUucrF00c ) really believes in the "Redsun" conspiracy that he mentioned, or if was just his idea of a practical joke, but in image quality and production values, it looks like the motion picture films that were shot aboard--and looking out the window of--Skylab, which is how such 1970s manned planetary flyby movies would have looked. (In Arthur C. Clarke's 1964 TIME-LIFE series book, "Man and Space," and in his 1968 book, "The Promise of Space," launch windows for such proposed Mars, Venus, and dual Mars-Venus [on the same flight] manned flyby missions, which were intended to occur between 1973 and 1978, were mentioned.) Also:

It includes window-view shots of the receding Earth and Moon (with the astronauts adjusting the focus and the pointing, just as on actual missions), on-board interior views showing hand-lettered humorous signs made by the crew ("Day 100!", etc.), and out-the-window views of Mars getting larger, and then of Mars sliding by the spacecraft docking module that's visible outside the window. A poignant view shows Valles Marineris just a hundred or so miles below, with the faces of the "Snoopy hat-clad" astronauts reflected in the window, as they gaze down upon the Martian vistas with expressions of wonder and awe... As well:

Such manned planetary flyby missions, which have been referred to as "space station missions that actually go somewhere," are still timely and relevant today. No one has ever flown anywhere near so far from Earth, and missions of this kind would help to break down a big psychological barrier. (This is based on not-entirely-unwarranted concerns about long-term life-support system reliability in deep space [despite even longer-duration ISS experience], cosmic and solar radiation exposure outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, and even isolation--with the Earth becoming just a bright star.) SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and BFR could loft such spaceships, which--due to their soft materials' superior radiation-blocking properties--could utilize Bigelow Aerospace's expandable modules for their habitation modules (with a docked or attached Dragon capsule for Earth return).
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