With all the talk of manned Mars
missions by Elon Musk and SpaceX and
more recently NASA it's easy to forget
that Mars isn't a recent obsession now
before we get into the details, this
video is a little different because this
is my first collaboration and part two
of this series will be done by Isaac
Arthur who will be looking at the Mars
missions from the roots of sci-fi in the
1990s to those which are proposed for
the coming decades there's a link in the
description that will take you there
directly and if you've come over from
Isaac's channel,  welcome to curious
droid and the first part of the manned
Mars missions that were planned for the
post Apollo period but never got off the
ground and I hope you can take a little
time to have a look around this channel
and also some of you have our videos and
hopefully like and subscribe. Now if you
haven't heard or seen Isaac's channel
then I recommend you hop on over there
after you've watched this of course
because this is a kind of sets up for his
video but his channel deals with the
science and futurism and covers a whole
load of things that I've never even
thought of
but I found highly informative and very
entertaining, well worth a visit if you
like your futurism on the grand scale.
Ever since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky,
Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Robert Esnault-Pelterie discovered the
principles of rocketry and Astronautics
in the early twentieth century we've been
planning on going to Mars though back
then it was much more of an academic
issue with a large dose of science
fiction but with the development of a V2
rocket led by Verna von Braun whilst he
was working for Germans in the 1940s the
possibility of space travel became a
reality. By 1948 when Von Braun was
working for the US developing its rocket
capability he'd published a book called
the Mars Project, this has become
probably the most influential book on
the subject of manned Mars missions even
though it was a rather grandiose scheme
which called for a fleet of 10
spacecraft carrying 70 or more people.
Von Braun used the idea that if Columbus
had set off to find the new world with
just a single ship and he would probably
have never made it back to Spain.
Although his book was looked upon as Sci-fi by some, von braun provided detailed
calculations to support his theories and
many of the ideas he put forward like
reusable shuttles, orbital assembly and
multiple spacecraft have greatly
influenced nasa's long-term plans for
manned interplanetary missions even if
they have been greatly cut down in scale.
He also covered the main problems of
getting men to Mars, such as the effect
of weightlessness on the human body,
radiation from a Sun and cosmic rays, 
using spacesuits to move from one ship
to another if one were to be disabled
and also the psychological effects of
having people live in enclosed space for
long periods of time.
Back in the 1950s and 60s there was
still the belief that if you're going to
go and do a space mission when you go
big. Just like Apollo was a huge effort
employing around 400,000 people the Mars proposals from both the US and the
Soviets were equally large especially
when national pride was at stake and the
spin-off was a range of new advanced
weapons. In the Soviet Union their answer
of Saturn 5, the ill-fated N1 rocket had
actually been designed by Sergey
Korolyov in the 1950s to launch a manned
Mars mission. The first serious Mars
planning done by the Soviets was headed
by Mikhail Tikhonravov In 1956 and was
known as the MPK or Martian Piloted
Complex. This would have a crew on a
30-month mission to land on the Martian
surface and stay there for just over a
year before returning. There were even
plans for a nuclear-powered Mars train
to be made up of five modules which
would travel across the Martian surface.
By 1959 a group within the OKB-1 design
bureau had started development of an
interplanetary spacecraft called the TMK
which was to carry a three-man crew for
a Mars flyby and drop remote control
Landers to the surface. A launch date was
penciled in for June 8th 1971 and
returning to Earth
over three years later. To overcome the
effects of weightlessness it was
proposed that the TMK would rotate about
its axis to create a form of artificial
gravity a bit like the space station in
the film 2001, however because of its
small diameter the Coriolis forces
created could have induced nausea which
would have been worse than the
weightlessness itself. Radiation was
still an unknown quantity but with data
from unmanned probes it was thought that
the cumulative radiation dose for a
return mission to Mars would have been
within safe levels but that didn't
account for solar flares this was to be
addressed by having a radiation shelter
which was a shielded tube in the center
of a craft with simplified instruments
and controls. Even as far back as the
1950s it was realized that chemical
rockets were just on the verge of
feasibility when trying to get a manned
mission to Mars and back again and that
nuclear on the other hand would provide
greater power with much lower mass
making for significantly shorter transit
times and the secondary abilities to
generate electrical power once at Mars. In
1954 Ernst Stuhlinger who was working
on Von Braun's team became interested in
electrical propulsion after reviewing a
paper on a subject by Herman J. Oberth.
Stuhlinger believed that a spacecraft
could be designed that would give
greater thrust than a chemical rocket if
it's set off from orbit. The nuclear
electric engine became the
interplanetary propulsion system favored
by the Soviet chief designer Sergey
Korolev, basically a nuclear reactor
creating electricity to drive a plasma
ion thruster. By 1962 in the U.S. NASA
commissioned the project EMPIRE studies
to look into the human exploration of
Mars and what would be required. Three
companies were involved Ford's
aeronautic division, General Dynamics and
Lockheed missiles of space. Ford
suggested a dual flyby of both Venus and
then onto Mars by launching and arriving
relative to Mars at the midpoint of the
to planetary trajectory, a sort of
planetary double-whammy. They suggested
using either a Saturn 5, nova or
supernova rockets to launch into orbit
and then the nuclear injection stage and
chemical rocket maneuvering. The whole
mission would last around 21 months and
cost $12.6 Billion around
about $100 billion in todays money plus
the cost of launch vehicle development.
General Dynamics suggested just a Mars
mission with a crew of around about
eight and again using a Saturn V and
nerva nuclear engine option. They said
that with nuclear engines and an optimal
launch date of 1973 to 75 when Mars
would be at its closest approach the
whole mission could be reduced to
400-450 days 
including a 30-50 day stay in
the Martian orbit with a possible
landing and sample return. The team said
that it would require 8 Saturn Vs to
assemble a Mars mission vehicle and
would have a payload around 450 tons. Their proposal would be over a
ten-year period from 1965 to 1975 and
cost $24.5  billion $196
billion in today's money.
Lockheed proposal was for a mission to
Mars that would last
670 days for up to a crew of 12 and will
be a precursor to later missions that
would land on the Martian surface. Again
it would use for Saturn V nuclear
Nerva propulsion combination but one
interesting difference here was that the
team suggested that a craft rotating at
three revolutions per minute could
generate 0.4g of gravity
during the interplanetary phase to help
offset the effect of weightlessness
pretty much like with TMK in the russian
solution. Although none of the Empire
missions moved beyond the initial design
phase, it was the first time since the
Mars project that detailed proposals
were carried out and shared with the
rest of a space community, this in time
would convince many in NASA that manned
missions to Mars were feasible. By 1969
Von Braun had been refining his own
ideas for Mars. His final plans had two ships each with
a six-man crew and would fly in a convoy
with the entire setup apart from the
Mars Lander being able to be reusable
for future missions. After the first moon
landings there was a brief enthusiasm for more
manned spaceflight Von Braun proposed
his vision of a manned Mars mission as
part of a post apollo integrated plan
which included a manned shuttle in its
original form by 1975, space stations
there after, plus continued development of
a saturn V as the launch stage and the
Nerva nuclear thermal upper stage for
the interplanetary part of the journey.
The beauty of this setup was that the
proven space station modules would be
used as the living quarters for the Mars
missions, the Saturn V was by now a well
proven way to get the main parts into
orbit and the nerva nuclear engine had
been tested and was ready to be put into
space. The only new hardware required
would be the Mars Lander. Testing was
envisaged starting in 1978 with the
first Mars mission in 1982. The shuttle
would be used to refurbish the Mars
crafting space with further missions
planned for 1983, 86 and 88 with a
50-person Mars base by 1989. however as
we know things didn't go according to
plan there was resistance from senior
figures within NASA to manned missions
beyond the moon. By the early 1970s the
public's interesting space had, waned the
war in Vietnam was like a political
albatross around the neck of the US
government and was costing a fortune.
There was little public appetite for
more hugely expensive space missions,
studies put the cost of a Mars mission
between $12 and $32 billion or between $93
and $250 billion in today's money.
Mars was seen as a dead and pretty
uninteresting place which was confirmed
rather ironically by the Mariner 7 flyby
the day after Von Braun's big 1969 Mars presentation to NASA. With a
change of administration in 1972 and
even with vice president Spiro Agnew's
endorsement of a Mars mission, Nixon
slashed NASA's budget and the only thing
left of a post Apollo plan was the much
repurposed Space Shuttle and the
leftover Saturn V rockets which were used
for the Skylab space station. The nerva
nuclear engine which was so reliant upon
the post Apollo plan was also scrapped.
In the Soviet Union the failure to
produce a workable N1 rocket and with
similar economic issues to the US the
Soviet Mars projects were also shelved
indefinitely with the development of the
N1's replacement the giant Energia
rocket in the mid 1970s and 80s and the
Soviet Space Shuttle Buran there was a
brief flurry of interest in Mars
missions once more but after the
collapse of a Soviet Union both the Energia  rocket and the remaining ideas for
Mars missions were also shelved. Although
there were successful robotic missions
to Mars in the following decades
interest in manned missions in the 1980s
and 90s was limited to the die-hard
planetary scientists and enthusiasts.
Even sci-fi gave up on Mars during this
time as it slipped from much of a
public's consciousness and this is where
our part one of the story ends and we
hand you over to Isaacs SFIA channel
for part two of the series. However we
aren't quite done yet the logistics of
planning a mission as complex as sending
men to Mars back in the day where most
of the working out was done with a slide
rule is truly amazing
just like Apollo it would have been a
massive undertaking bringing together
thousands of scientists engineers and
mathematicians and is truly incredible
to imagine the full complexity of the
operation. To begin to get a grasp of how
these things working in the trenches
you might start small for instance how
fast must we launch an object from the
surface of the earth to get into space
you can look up the answer if you want
but if you like me you want to create
things yourself. Our sponsor for this
collaboration brilliant.org
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skills set is crucial because it opens
up so many ways to explore the universe.
To support curious droid and to learn
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