Kirbstone wrote:I must admit that although I pursue astronomy and have had an avid interest in all things pertaining to space flight I had never even heard of this 'Energia' proposed manned flight past Venus.
I, too, tend to follow space exploration fairly closely, and have a very good friend who as a professional astronomer and Visiting Scholar at Brown University in Providence who has access to the very latest information in the field, and was unaware that there was a manned Energia mission even tentatively put forward. Certainly Energia was designed to be man-rated as one of intended payloads was the Soviet shuttle orbiter, but there hasn't been a launch of the booster system in a good many years.
On the face of it, [a manned Venusian flyby] would have been totally daft from every point of view. How would they have perswaded any cosmonaut to actually fly on the thing? Look what the robotic Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn/Titan is still achieving!
Indeed, and the gap between what requires human hands-on activity and what robots can accomplish is narrowing continuously; the very interesting dual-rover missions to Mars point that up, and of course there's the ongoing saga of Cassini/Huygens and the twin Voyagers which are rapidly heading out of our solar system altogether.
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The obvious next big adventure is Mars, of course. To get there and back will certainly require global co-operation and finance, so the actual ethnic/racial make up of any crew can only be guessed at, and whether English will be the language spoken on board is also anybody's guess.
This assumes that we as a species can climb out of the economic morass that we're currently in, and that some parties are actively trying to make the problem worse. If such a mission flies, it almost certainly will not be of European or US -- or possibly even western -- makeup.
Perhaps I won't live to see it.
Nor, probably, I.
