Mars 1981 by RobertJ

Bryce • Science/Medical • posted on Jun 28, 2009

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Description

Its almost 40 years ago that Neil Amstrong set his first footsteps on the moon, 6 years later the whole Apollo program ended with a Orbital handshake in the ASTP project. It could have been so different, alongside the Apollo program was a program called Nerva wich would provide the nessecary oomph to get a decent sized spacecraft and crew from low orbit towards Mars. But at the height of the Apollo program, Nasa finest hour, the budgets where cut and Nasa had to finds its way in the Space Shuttle wich would hold them close to Earth for the next 45 years (Once the Ares-V goes into operation we will be well into 2020ties). It could have been so different, this expedition would launch itself towards Mars in 1981.

Comments (8)

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geirla

10:47AM | Sun, 28 June 2009

Nicely done! Great work on the engines. Yeah, shuttle was a dead end, though that wasn't obvious until '86. I blame Nixon.

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sim3344

10:47AM | Sun, 28 June 2009

Great work!!!

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pakled

1:16PM | Sun, 28 June 2009

That's because they pushed it as a 'race'; once you won (went to the moon), how many victory laps did you need? A missed opportunity, alas. Great modeling.

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shayhurs

3:43PM | Sun, 28 June 2009

Nice job indeed. Things could have been so different...

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NefariousDrO

5:43PM | Sun, 28 June 2009

Ahh, if only... Of course, we blew so much money in Vietnam we couldn't even afford to take care of ourselves, much less fund something like this. It's such a shame that we're only now trying to make our rockets cost-efficient enough to finally make space accessible. So many resources squandered in meaningless wars, so much time thrown away... Very cool render of what could have been, and excellent modeling, very realistic designs.

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rj001

5:25AM | Mon, 29 June 2009

great work

Taaner

2:05AM | Fri, 03 July 2009

As Story Musgrave said, "Once we started to do space travel, we forgot the real reason why we were doing it." We- Americans and Russians alike, were deluded into believing that we were competing against our "adversaries across the waters" to demonstrate which political ideology was superior. And the space shuttle wasn't necessarily a dead end if it had been handled right. IF you saw the movie LIFEFORCE, a joint NASA-ESA mission was send to investigate Halley's Comet aboard an upgraded space shuttle- the HMS Winston Churchill- which was equipped with the NERVA propulsion system for the trip. Cool render. I was into Wily Ley and Chesley Bonestel as a kid. Would have loved to have seen their dreams of space travel realized.

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