Manned Venus Orbiting Mission

Abstract

Manned orbiting stopover round trips to Venus are studied for departure dates between 1975 and 1986 over a range of trip times and stay times. The use of highly elliptic parking orbits at Venus leads to low initial weights in Earth orbit compared with circular orbits. For the elliptic parking orbit, the effect of constraints on the low altitude observation time on the initial weight is shown. The mission can be accomplished with the Apollo level of chemical propulsion, but advanced chemical or nuclear propulsion can give large weight reductions. The Venus orbiting mission weights than the corresponding Mars mission.