Manned Venus Landing

[Bill Phil]

How about we build cities in the sky here on Earth first...

[fredinno]

I don 't think getting off of Venus' gravity well is as difficult as people make it out to be. Really, you could fill your airship's balloon with ammonia from Earth (a lifting gas on Venus) initially to stay afloat in the clouds, then use the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to make methane-oxygen rocket fuel to get off of Venus' surface. The nitrogen (also a lifting gas on Venus) produced and additional ammonia would then be pumped back into the balloon, keeping the airship's altitude stable.

Aka: 4NH3 + 3CO2 -> 3CH4 + 3O2 + 2N2.

A research base in Venus' atmosphere is plausible in the near future (especially if life is found in Venus' clouds), but a colony? Nah.

Edited May 17, 2015 by fredinno

[Padishar]

Aka: 2NH4 + 2CO2 -> 2CH4 + 2O2 + N2.

Ammonia is NH3...

4NH3 + 3CO2 -> 3CH4 + 3O2 + 2N2 ?

[fredinno]

Whoops. My idea still holds true, though.

[Jonboy]

Whoops. My idea still holds true, though.

ISRU like what you just described, along with reusable rockets a la Space X, are the two technologies that would truly open the floodgates to manned exploration of the solar system.

If Musk is successful, we may be very close to figuring out reusable rockets. ISRU, on the other hand, is much talked about, but nobody has tried it or seems to be close. Let's hope cheap rockets provide incentive to start working on practical ISRU in the near future.

[fredinno]

ISRU is supposed to be tested on the Mars 2020 Rover.

[Jonboy]

ISRU is supposed to be tested on the Mars 2020 Rover.

Very cool, thanks for bringing this to my attention. The experiment is a 1/100th scale prototype that will create O2 using CO2 in Mars' atmosphere via solid oxide electrolysis.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment

[KerikBalm]

If you need something beyond carbon dioxide and water vapor to be self-sufficient, you're doing it wrong.

Umm, Phosphorus? Nitrogren? Metals?

All this you need for life.

All this except for the nitrogen you won't find in the atmosphere of venus.

You need metals both for biology (good luck making heme without iron, or chlorophyl in your plants/algae without magnesium... good luck having any brain activity or functioning cells without sodium, potassium, calcium... etc), and for constructing the machines you need to survive.

To make Hydrocarbons, you need not just Carbon, but also Hydrogen - something very rare one Venus.

Water vapor is 20 parts per million there....

There's very little hydrogen in the atmosphere at all, or the planet for that matter, which is why the D/H ratio is over 15 times higher than on Earth...

Mars has much more accessible water in the form of frozen ground deposits... better than trying to extract it from air at 20 ppm...

Also, its air, in terms of percent, has much more water vapor:

http://sci.esa.int/mars-express/49342-esa-orbiter-discovers-water-supersaturation-in-the-martian-atmosphere/

It'll be easier to run an air compressor, than to try and condense water from the Venusian atmosphere.

Venus is a **** hole.

If you had cloud colonies supporting hundreds of millions of people, you'd have far more disasters that kill far more people than the Earthquakes on Earth.

BTW Earth's mantle is predominatly solid... but behaves as a liquid similar to the way a frozen glacier may flow...

Nobody claims a glacier is liquid.

Edited May 18, 2015 by KerikBalm

[zarakon]

https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)

The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.

Venus is a terrible place.

[SargeRho]

But those winds basically go around the planet, right? In which case, you can just glide with them.

[Jonboy]

But those winds basically go around the planet, right? In which case, you can just glide with them.

Yes, but you may want to leave your seatbelt fastened, in the event you encounter some minor turbulence.

[StrandedonEarth]

Step 1: Place or build (presumably from asteroidal resources) a huge sunshade at the Venus/Sun L1 point, to cool the planet.

Step 2: Wait. Eventually the planet will cool and the atmosphere will precipitate out. I'll make a WAG of 100-1000 years.

Step 3: Profit!

[Beowolf]

Exactly. Mars is just a little farther away, but has about the same amount of land as Earth, water in the poles and underground, and is much easier to return from. I'm not saying living on Mars is easy, but compared to Venus it's a vacation.

NASA has pointed out that Mars is actually much farther away when judged by minimum length of round trip. Transfer windows between Earth and Venus are available more often, making early interplanetary missions significantly shorter. Venus is also much easier to return from, because of its impossible surface conditions. Nobody's landing there and a Venus stratospheric airship mission involves less delta-v than a Mars landing.

But the biggest issue is some at NASA don't want our first interplanetary mission to be so long. A Venus flyby mission could be back home in about a year, and we can afford complete life-support backup. The astronauts use the fancy recycling machines we'd use for a Mars mission, but if those break, they also have sufficient stored supplies to finish the mission. That isn't practical for a 5-year Mars mission. Those machines will have to work. So, given that info, I agree a shakedown cruise is an excellent idea.

I don't know whether a Venus flyby is better than that proposed asteroid capture mission, but concur with their need for a multi-month-but-shorter-than-Mars mission. Just in the past few years on ISS we've learned about longterm changes in astronaut eyesight, and chemical changes happening to medications kept in orbit for six months. I expect we'll find more nasty little surprises the first time humans live in deep space for months. I'd rather not use up too many astronauts discovering them.

[jrphilps]

Has anyone considered pantropy?

Baseline humans would need massive amounts of protection to guarantee their survival on venus. A genetically or cybernetically enhanced superhuman could land on venus with much less fuss. After the singularity, humans will have the power to radically alter their own physiologys, which might lead to entirely separate species. Some of them might actually be able to withstand that kind of environment (at least if they are only partially exposed).

[Zucal]

Has anyone considered pantropy?

Baseline humans would need massive amounts of protection to guarantee their survival on venus. A genetically or cybernetically enhanced superhuman could land on venus with much less fuss. After the singularity, humans will have the power to radically alter their own physiologys, which might lead to entirely separate species. Some of them might actually be able to withstand that kind of environment (at least if they are only partially exposed).

Sorry, what? The "singularity" is a clickbait term for a revolution in robotics and consciousness that won't happen for hundreds of years, if ever. We don't know how our own brain works, so how do you suggest we create AI and then how does that lead to genetically engineering humans to withstand Venus's atmosphere? Whatever insane propositions the singularity entails will come long after we have the technology to land and return on Venus, if at all.

[jrphilps]

Sorry, what? The "singularity" is a clickbait term for a revolution in robotics and consciousness that won't happen for hundreds of years, if ever. We don't know how our own brain works, so how do you suggest we create AI and then how does that lead to genetically engineering humans to withstand Venus's atmosphere? Whatever insane propositions the singularity entails will come long after we have the technology to land and return on Venus, if at all.

You have been misled. To say that the singularity won't happen for hundreds of years is comically misguided. Before this century is out, human civilisation (if it survives at all) will be ruled by a superintelligence. Convergent advances in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will create several pathways for the development of superhuman intelligences: These entitys will have enough power to rapidly outcompete baseline humans and gain control over the gross output of the entire world. They will be running the show, and we will just be along for the ride.

Regardless of what happens politically, if humans are able to survive the singularity, they will aquire the ability to radically alter their own physiologys. How could this help them survive in environments like venus? Some clades may have completely different body chemistrys, and be swathed in cybernetic equipment. This wouldn't allow them to survive direct and prolonged exposure, but it would greatly reduce the amount of infrastructure needed to keep them alive. They would actually be able to establish a prolonged human presence on venus, instead of an isolated outpost requiring constant babysitting.

[Whirligig Girl]

Venus is very hot and the pressure is 90 times that at sea level on Earth

https://i.imgflip.com/llxny.jpg

If we freeze it out then the pressure drops.

Only problem is this:

https://i.imgflip.com/llxvf.jpg

The sun is not really the cause of Venus' heat. Venus technically lies within the golidilocks zone of our sun (as does Mars). What kills Venus is it's thick atmosphere which traps solar heat inside. A Runaway greenhouse effect. Something you don't want to happen on a planet that life is expected to stay on.

[DeepOdyssey]

We would need a pressurized suit like this, hardened even more to handle even greater pressures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit

but also made from materials able to withstand corrosion. So basically it would not be a suit, it would be a walking mech,more similar to a machine than anything. So basically it would be much better to use vehicles than suits while exploring the surface.

As for colonies, we already have polymers that can handle the corrosion, so we could build a big reinforced airballoons that could easily float a big weight underneath, given the density of atmosphere.