SecondCor521
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I occasionally watch things about SpaceX and travel to Mars.
One topic that came up was how long it takes to get from Earth to Mars, with the current SpaceX answer with Starship being about six months one way, and only during a window of about six months out of every twenty four. I think the idea behind this approach is to launch in an elliptical orbit outward from Earth towards Mars, where the far end of the ellipse is Mars (or the orbit around Mars).
An idea occurred to me that there might be a faster way to get there. Here's my idea:
Instead of launching on a direct elliptical path, use a modified version of the slingshot idea that we used on Voyager 1 and 2. Launch from the Earth, slingshot around the trailing edge of the Moon towards Venus, then around the trailing edge of Venus out to Mars orbital insertion.
This would require Venus to be somewhat "behind" Earth in it's orbit and it probably works best if Mars is also behind Earth but ahead of Venus, with the Moon maybe ahead of and on the Solar side of it's orbit around the Earth. This may be a rare occurrence, but it seems like it should happen at least sometimes. If you look at The Planets Today : A live view of the solar system with today's date (10/7/24) and Earth and Venus are where they currently are, and Mars is where Ceres currently is and the Moon is where it was on about 9/28/2024, that's the arrangement I'm thinking could work.
It could be faster because both (a) slingshots can speed up your velocity, and (b) the overall distance could be shorter because for the Venus to Mars section you could be going "straight out" from the Sun rather than on the "elliptical orbit catchup" path from Earth out to Mars in the same direction (counterclockwise on the above website). Using slingshots to gain velocity and using a shorter path also could reduce the amount of fuel required, which might enable a somewhat larger payload.
A second, similar idea would be to skip Venus entirely and slingshot around the Moon and back out to Mars. For this similar idea, if the Moon is almost new (say 10/1/2024 location) and Mars is slightly behind the Earth, you could slingshot around the trailing edge of the Moon, then around the trailing edge of Earth, directly out towards Mars. This is one less slingshot, but requires one less celestial body to be in the right place and is arguably even more of a straight line.
Now of course, Elon Musk and all the SpaceX engineers are smart folks, so I'm 99.999% sure that my idea doesn't work for some reason, or it does work but it's suboptimal for some reason. If that's the case, I'd be interested to understand the reason why it isn't a good idea.
One problem is that the planets might not be in this arrangement often. The Moon seems not to be that big of an issue because it moves, relatively speaking, so much faster than Venus and Mars, so it should pass through an opportune location frequently enough.
Another possible thing that could be wrong with these ideas is the accuracy of the launch and slingshot might be beyond our reach. But it seems like we should be able to adjust the trajectories like we did several times on Apollo 13, so this latter issue seems conquerable.
Finally, maybe the slingshots around the Moon and Venus don't add much velocity because they're not particularly massive. But they are pretty massive compared to a Starship rocket, so it seems like that shouldn't be the issue.
There's always the 0.001% chance that I've thought of something that nobody else has. I do have a US utility patent to my name, so it's not the craziest thing that could occur.
I've just never heard of this idea even being mentioned, so I thought I'd throw it out there.
One topic that came up was how long it takes to get from Earth to Mars, with the current SpaceX answer with Starship being about six months one way, and only during a window of about six months out of every twenty four. I think the idea behind this approach is to launch in an elliptical orbit outward from Earth towards Mars, where the far end of the ellipse is Mars (or the orbit around Mars).
An idea occurred to me that there might be a faster way to get there. Here's my idea:
Instead of launching on a direct elliptical path, use a modified version of the slingshot idea that we used on Voyager 1 and 2. Launch from the Earth, slingshot around the trailing edge of the Moon towards Venus, then around the trailing edge of Venus out to Mars orbital insertion.
This would require Venus to be somewhat "behind" Earth in it's orbit and it probably works best if Mars is also behind Earth but ahead of Venus, with the Moon maybe ahead of and on the Solar side of it's orbit around the Earth. This may be a rare occurrence, but it seems like it should happen at least sometimes. If you look at The Planets Today : A live view of the solar system with today's date (10/7/24) and Earth and Venus are where they currently are, and Mars is where Ceres currently is and the Moon is where it was on about 9/28/2024, that's the arrangement I'm thinking could work.
It could be faster because both (a) slingshots can speed up your velocity, and (b) the overall distance could be shorter because for the Venus to Mars section you could be going "straight out" from the Sun rather than on the "elliptical orbit catchup" path from Earth out to Mars in the same direction (counterclockwise on the above website). Using slingshots to gain velocity and using a shorter path also could reduce the amount of fuel required, which might enable a somewhat larger payload.
A second, similar idea would be to skip Venus entirely and slingshot around the Moon and back out to Mars. For this similar idea, if the Moon is almost new (say 10/1/2024 location) and Mars is slightly behind the Earth, you could slingshot around the trailing edge of the Moon, then around the trailing edge of Earth, directly out towards Mars. This is one less slingshot, but requires one less celestial body to be in the right place and is arguably even more of a straight line.
Now of course, Elon Musk and all the SpaceX engineers are smart folks, so I'm 99.999% sure that my idea doesn't work for some reason, or it does work but it's suboptimal for some reason. If that's the case, I'd be interested to understand the reason why it isn't a good idea.
One problem is that the planets might not be in this arrangement often. The Moon seems not to be that big of an issue because it moves, relatively speaking, so much faster than Venus and Mars, so it should pass through an opportune location frequently enough.
Another possible thing that could be wrong with these ideas is the accuracy of the launch and slingshot might be beyond our reach. But it seems like we should be able to adjust the trajectories like we did several times on Apollo 13, so this latter issue seems conquerable.
Finally, maybe the slingshots around the Moon and Venus don't add much velocity because they're not particularly massive. But they are pretty massive compared to a Starship rocket, so it seems like that shouldn't be the issue.
There's always the 0.001% chance that I've thought of something that nobody else has. I do have a US utility patent to my name, so it's not the craziest thing that could occur.
I've just never heard of this idea even being mentioned, so I thought I'd throw it out there.
