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From the False Steps Blog:
By the mid-1960s NASA was well aware that if they successfully completed the Apollo moon landings they would probably face a severe decline in budget for the manned space program. In the hopes of proving their ongoing worth they developed a few different post-Apollo proposals using evolutionary versions of the Apollo hardware, including plans for a manned lunar base, space stations, and planetary exploration. The latter two of these goals were at first grouped under the name Apollo X, and then became the Apollo Applications Program (AAP).
By far the most ambitious of the AAP missions was a manned flyby of the planet Venus. After two preliminary missions in Earth orbit to test the technology, a Saturn V launch would lift an Apollo Command Module into orbit. As in a typical mission, the first two stages of the rocket would be jettisoned. However the uppermost stage, the Saturn IVB, would be kept and drained of any remaining propellant. Using gear stored where the Lunar Landing Module would have been placed in a Moon mission, the astronauts would then rig it as a habitation module.
The resulting 33-meter-long spacecraft would leave Earth orbit on October 31, 1973 and travel towards Venus for 123 days. There would be a flyby on March 3, 1974. The craft would have been aimed to pass Venus as close as 6200 kilometers above the surface (one planet radius) very quickly-orbital mechanics would have it moving relative to Venus at a clip of 16,500 kilometers per hour-crossing the lit side of the planet. A sidescan radar would map the portion of the planet they could see as they flew by, and the astronauts would perform spectroscopic and photographic studies.
A series of probes was to be dropped by the spacecraft, and they were specifically enumerated in the proposal for the Triple Flyby variant of this mission that was mentioned earlier. Near closest approach the MVF would launch an orbiter and fourteen planetary probes; the probes would communicate with the orbiter, which would then beam the results back to Earth.
MVF Mission Trajectory
After that burst of activity the MVF craft would then return home, taking 273 days more to loop out to 1.24 AU from the Sun on a hyperbolic trajectory and eventually swing back to Earth. The astronauts’ landing on Earth would happen on December 1, 1974-total mission time would be 396 days. The Triple Flyby variant would have taken more than 800 days starting in 1977.
When not at Venus, the MVF astronauts would have studied the Sun and solar wind as well as making observations of Mercury, which would be only 0.3 AU away two weeks after the Venus flyby. To keep them occupied otherwise their habitation capsule would have been outfitted with a small movie screen (to show 2 kilograms of movies allowed), and a “viscous damper exercycle/g-conditioner”. The crew would also be allowed 1.5 kilograms of recorded music, 1 kilogram of games, and 9 kilograms of reading material. Hopefully they would choose wisely.
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