To tell the truth I’ve been rather busy this last year – hence no Blog. Anyway I’m back.
I’ve been watching the BBC mini-series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, which concluded last night. I suppose you could describe it as a docu-drama. In all it was pretty good although it got increasingly far-fetched towards the end.
I know I write with a little knowledge in this area (an academic back ground in space science, not forgetting that crucial GCSE in Astronomy) but things I wouldn’t do on the first manned misson around the solar system:
- Land on Venus – 400 deg C, acid rain, active volcanoes and enough air pressure to squash you flat….
- Sling shot round the sun without any ability to dodge solar flares
- Go through the “asteroid belt”. Even allowing for the fact that it’s not the dense collection of rocks that most people think it is (space is really big and you’d need a lot of rock to fill it) I’d still go outside the plane of most asteroids’ orbits
- Land on Io – really active volcanoes, even more so than Venus. Plus Jupiter’s gravity well and radiation fields
- Not land on Europa. Possibly the next most interesting thing around here next to Mars and they send a probe.
- Stick your spacecraft in a gap in Saturn’s rings – how dodgy is that? And then do an EVA
- Ignore all the Saturian moons apart from Titan. At least give one of Iapetus (albedo variation), Mimas (massive crater) or Enceladus (geologically active?) a look
- Ignore Uranus or Neptune in favour of Pluto unless (as in the case of this programme) you really can’t make the orbital mechanics work for you
- Land on a comet that is getting close enough to the sun to heat up
It’s amazing they got back at all.
Still it wouldn’t have been an exciting docu-thingy if they’d played it safe
