massive Saturn V rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center carrying three men to an extraordinary destination, which they reach after a four-month journey on March 3, 1974. The destination is the planet Venus, for the first manned interplanetary spaceflight: an extreme mission, allowing only a few frantic hours of low-flying spaceflight before hurtling back home, but it is a political triumph and a further demonstration of NASA’s coordination skills, fresh from the historic success of the Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. The close-up reconnaissance of Venus carried out by American astronauts reveals a wealth of previously unknown data about a scorching, inhospitable world and brings back unforgettable photographs to Earth when it concludes, a year after departure, with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. If you’re thinking you don’t remember this mission and those unforgettable photos, don’t worry: it never happened. But it had been studied and planned in great detail by NASA, as described, for example, in the nearly two hundred pages of the 1967 Manned Venus Flyby report and in many other technical documents from the US space agency. It may seem incredible, but when astronauts hadn’t even been around the Moon, much less landed (Apollo 8, the first circumlunar flight, would take place in December 1968), NASA was already thinking about the post-lunar future. It intended that the infrastructure, Saturn V launchers, and Apollo spacecraft designed for the Moon would be reused in slightly modified form, at relatively modest cost, to open the doors to manned interplanetary exploration.
