Once again, between the writing and trying to knock out a certification by next weekend, I’m just not putting a lot of random words down on the site.
Space fub fact for the meantime: when the Apollo program missions began to get cancelled, they began looking for other things they could do with the extra hardware. The most famous examples were of course the Apollo-Soyuz project (where, hilariously, they had to design a special docking unit because neither country wanted to be the “female” end of a “male-female” docking system, and oh God I wish I was making that up) and Skylab, the site of the first real mutiny in space (if you don’t count the Apollo 13 guys ripping off their bio monitors).
But what they almost did was fascinating. They actually planned a Venus fly-by using Apollo era hardware. They would’ve used a hollowed-out upper stage of the Saturn V for long-term living quarters for the time it would take to pass Venus and return to Earth. It would’ve been nothing more than a publicity stunt, really; they would’ve rocketed past the planet without doing a whole hell of a lot of science. But it got vetoed and essentially eventually led to the Skylab project.
An interesting part of that plan, though, was their calculation that if they ever wanted to send a manned mission into Venus’s atmosphere, the density would mean that any vessel pressurized to the comfort of Earthlings would be so much less dense that it would act as a balloon and hold itself aloft. You could decelerate an Apollo CSM, and it would fall into the upper atmosphere until it found a state of equilibrium and just bob there. (The Russian Venera probes, of course, didn’t have cavities filled with air inside, which is how they were able to reach the surface and almost instantly melt.)