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The science of Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets


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Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets is a two part BBC drama about a manned spaceflight exploring the solar system. From what I read this programme was supposedly grounded in sound science, realism and based on today's technology. But I'm not so sure.

The first place visited was Venus which given the totally inhospitable atmosphere struck me as an odd choice to begin with. But what left me wondering was the small surface lander portrayed which was something like an oversized, beefed up lunar module.

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So my first question is: if Venus is roughly the same mass as the earth surely to leave Venus and escape its gravity wouldn't it require a rocket of similar size to an Earth based rocket? This lander only had to make it back to the main ship in orbit around the planet but even so I thought it would take a full size rocket to reach the required speed to orbit.

Later in the trip they went to Jupiter's moon Io. To me this seemed like the last of the four big moons one would want to visit because of it's extreme volcanic activity. So my second question is why would we choose to there instead of Europa or Ganymede or Callisto?

These questions are based on the claims that this programme's whole raison d'etre was to provide a realistic impression of what manned spaceflight in the near future could be.

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They would be in trouble if they include the gas giants for sure.

I agree Venus is a ludicrous starting point, a totally inhospitable environment. Escape Velocity 10.3kps, not much less than earth

Mercury is kinda hot too, but OK at 4.4kps ev.

Technology could change to accommodate a landings on the feasable Solar System planets, but it's a long way off yet.

Jupiters moons are possible, and you're right, where would a safe landing area on Io be found.

The whole moon seems to be turbelent with volcanic geysers.

That capsule looks like a Dalek to me :).

Ron.

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To me some of it seemed feasible. Mars seemed pretty well thought out, which makes sense given the amount of research that has actually been carried out on how to go about it.

Venus, I don't see how it would work. Not only is the escape velocity similar to Earth. You either are looking at blumming big fuel tanks and chemical rockets - or you go with Nuclear engines. Given that Pegasus was meant to have nuclear rocket motors one can assume this was also used in the Venus lander, but even so they would still need a very large engine, or, more appropriate to the job and to safety through redundancy, a multi-stage system of a small central (onboard) motor, and 4 or so small strap on motors discarded during ascent.

The other problem is weight. The pressure on Venus is insane and any lander would need to be built more like a submarine than a space vehicle to survive on the surface.

Io as a visit makes sence, as though dangerous it has the most interesting research potential. I think however a robotic lander on Io is the obvious way to recover data from such a toxic environment, whilst Europa makes an ideal target for a manned mission, so I would have swapped them around. A manned landing on Europa would be relatively straight-forward (compared to Io!) and a human mission would be better suited to identifying interesting features and operating more sophisticated drilling equipment to obtain larger ice cores. By contrast, a robot would be far better able to explore volanic features on Io, since they can more easily be radiation hardened and can handle volcanic and other nasty substances more easily.

Pluto, once the very long travel time is factored is otherwise fairly doable. A mission to Pluto doesn't require much energy and escape velocity is low and there is only a very thin atmosphere, so a lander wouldn't need to be much more than a conventional lunar lander...

Just my two pennies worth from the armchair engineer :)

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A bit of searhing around and I found this pdf about the science behind the series.

The Venus lander apparently weighed 35 tons and had one window cut from a single diamond. It was made withstand 900 tonnes of air pressure per square metre

of its surface and temperatures of 500ºC. It used "a toroidal aerospike engine" which could reach escape velocity of over 10km/second in just under eight minutes. I looked up about these engines and they're apparently 25 - 30% more efficient than a normal rocket engine. This still makes me think it should have had considerably more fuel/bigger rocket.

Yep you're right about Io. Interesting because of the volcanic matter there.

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