A forgotten mission: NASA once planned to send astronauts to Venus

One of the subplots of the recently concluded first season of Apple TV’s “Star City” — the spinoff of the alternate history television series “For All Mankind” — concerns a Soviet-crewed flyby of Venus taking place in the early 1970s. The mission is fraught with Cold War intrigue and Soviet-era paranoia and corruption.

However, many people do not know that NASA seriously considered a similar space mission during the same timeframe.

It was part of the Apollo Applications Program, which studied concepts for space missions using Apollo/Saturn hardware, ranging from extended lunar stays to crewed orbiting space stations. NASA conducted studies for such missions even before the Apollo 11 moon landing took place.

One of the concepts, a Venus flyby mission, would have been a bold undertaking indeed, considering the technology available at the time and the lack of research on the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body.

A company called Bellcomm, which was a subsidiary of Bell Labs in the 1960s, conducted the study for the Venus flyby on NASA’s behalf. Kirk Sorenson, a nuclear and aerospace engineer, provided a summary of the study’s conclusions in the Selenian Boondocks blog.

The concept would have involved launching an Apollo capsule with a Saturn V rocket into low Earth orbit. Instead of a lunar module, the Environmental Support Module for the long voyage would have been included, containing equipment and........

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