Venus Mission Idea

[Snark]

3 minutes ago, todofwar said:

Instead of testing survivability and possible diffusion paths for a manned mission, let's say it's to test survivability for a larger unmanned airship.

Heck, you had me at "let's strew little balloons all over Venus."    Don't even need 'em for studying feasibility of a big ship... they can do lots of valuable research in their own right.  That right there's enough to make it worthwhile, if done well.

[lajoswinkler]

32 minutes ago, Ten Key said:

 

http://www.airspacemag.com/space/forbidden-planet-57795399/?page=1

Quality of that article isn't promising. It says the lander would get eaten away by acids. Venusian surface conditions are inert towards metallic alloys used in construction of such vehicle. The only active ingredient, so to speak, is supercritical carbon dioxide which has the ability to eat through polymers.

 

For some reason, people tend to forget the acids don't reach the surface. They fall down as rain or heavy mist at least, but evaporate long before they reach the regolith. There are only traces of those compounds down there and no liquid water, so metals get passivated. A thin layer of metal salt would be formed (if any) and that's it. The temperatures are high, but not high enough to drive the oxidation without a solvent.

[Clark Griswold]

Just saw the HAVOC video and one thing I didn't see pitched in the concept that seemed logical was a surface soil / atmosphere collection via unmanned system and retrieval to the floating manned station - is this remotely feasible?  

 

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, Clark Griswold said:

Just saw the HAVOC video and one thing I didn't see pitched in the concept that seemed logical was a surface soil / atmosphere collection via unmanned system and retrieval to the floating manned station - is this remotely feasible?  

 

Some more but don't see why you need humans on the airship. 
You could drop probes down to surface, inflate an balloon and get them up again, then capture them with the airship, transfer sample to the rocket. 
This can also be done robotic who reduce the payload requirements to a few kg, so you can get away with an pretty small rocket. 

The only thing humans are better at is taking the sample from the balloon probe and put in rocket, But you can use some ton equipment, perhaps an drone to grab sample and return to airship if capture directly with airship is hard,even teleopperate from Venus orbit is possible but probably not needed. 

Upper stage with payload will dock with an return probe in Venus orbit, payload will be transferred inside an return pod on the return stage who then drop the docking and payload handling system with the upper stage and return stage will wait for earth transfer window. 

[Clark Griswold]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Some more but don't see why you need humans on the airship. 
You could drop probes down to surface, inflate an balloon and get them up again, then capture them with the airship, transfer sample to the rocket. 
This can also be done robotic who reduce the payload requirements to a few kg, so you can get away with an pretty small rocket. 

The only thing humans are better at is taking the sample from the balloon probe and put in rocket, But you can use some ton equipment, perhaps an drone to grab sample and return to airship if capture directly with airship is hard,even teleopperate from Venus orbit is possible but probably not needed. 

Upper stage with payload will dock with an return probe in Venus orbit, payload will be transferred inside an return pod on the return stage who then drop the docking and payload handling system with the upper stage and return stage will wait for earth transfer window. 

Valid but I think there is value in having a manned airship (more science performed, technology development, operational experience, etc...) in the HAVOC proposal.  

IMO, HAVOC and specifically the development of the transfer vehicles and ideally a system of shuttling continuously vehicles between Venus - Earth - Mars is viable crawl-walk-run strategy for inner solar system exploration.

First mission(s) to Venus for tele-robotic sample collection and concept development (atmospheric entry would be awesome but not necessary) then leverage that experience for Mars orbital / Martian moon landing missions, building infrastructure (orbital & surface) for a landing in the mid 2030's during these missions in the 2020's.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a17552/phobos-landing/

[Findthepin1]

14 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Some more but don't see why you need humans on the airship. 

Because it's cool! It wouldn't be as cool if it were all done autonomously. It's people at Venus.