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EMPIRE Hunting: Part 4

In Orbit

Above: In the flyby scenario, Mars is studied by teleoperated probes. Below Artwork from Ehricke’s time at Convair showing the EMPIRE convoy in orbit. The MEV descends to the surface, landers based on NASA’s Surveyor are dispatched to Deimos and Phobos, a balloon deploys in the Martian atmosphere while a satellite begins to survey the planet.

From:

Transportation [1]

Planets and Planetary Missions

Above: Surface operations. These images are from the SDASM Archive. Below: From the KAE papers, the MEV returns to orbit.

From: Transportation [1]

Departure

Above: With everything and everyone safely stowed, the fleet get a “Go!” from Mission Control. Below: Free of Mars’ gravitational pull – and on course for Earth – the third stage is discarded.

From: Transportation [3]

Arriving Home

Back in Earth orbit, the crew would transfer to the EEM for re-entry. I think these are from Ehricke’s time at Convair and the paintings by John Sentovic.

From: Artists’ concepts (Spacecraft) [1 of 6 folders]

1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Image credit: Krafft Ehricke Papers

Image source: NASM

3 thoughts on “EMPIRE Hunting: Part 4”

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