Venusian mining

[AckSed]

I can think of a survival sense, if not an economic sense, for there to be mining of the Venusian surface. Say an aerostat colony has been cut off from resupply missions. They typically sustain themselves by airmining noble gases, making advanced plastics, carbon nanotube composites and fusing deuterium into He3, but they do not have the resources to transmute certain trace elements like phosphorous for enriching their soil. In that case, they could make a pressure vessel and mine the peak of Maxwell Montes. At a 'chilly' 380 deg. C and 41 atmospheres it's... within sight of sanity. It makes me wonder how much cooling could be had with a kite-lofted radiator or similar, though,

[kerbiloid]

(Tries to imagine a typical farm or a factory hanging from a myriad of balloons when the biggest airship ever could carry just 20 tonnes).

[farmerben]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

(Tries to imagine a typical farm or a factory hanging from a myriad of balloons when the biggest airship ever could carry just 20 tonnes).

Hydrogen and helium have too many drawbacks.  Economy demands something cheap and reliable.  Methane balloons are half as bouyant as those, cheaper, easier to contain, and have almost never been deployed.

 

Edited December 20, 2022 by farmerben

[Shpaget]

7 hours ago, farmerben said:

Hydrogen and helium have too many drawbacks.  Economy demands something cheap and reliable.  

 

Hydrogen is the way to go. There is no oxygen in atmosphere of Venus, so it's not flamable. It is hard to produce, though, with all the lack of water we take for granted on Earth.

Which brings us to the top choice -  air. Nitrogen and oxygen, just the way we like to breath. Venus atmo is CO2, so nitrogen is a lifting gas there. Oxygen because your baloons can do double duty as habitats.

[kerbiloid]

Hydrogen is contained in the sulfic acid clouds, though enormous size of required balloons (to keep in air farms and factories) makes the whole idea hopeless.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Hydrogen is contained in the sulfic acid clouds, though enormous size of required balloons (to keep in air farms and factories) makes the whole idea hopeless.

What if you had a SSFO?  Drop a spaceplane in until it's below plasma speed in the atmosphere, pump in the good stuff, seal it off and rocket back out again.  Given the density, you shouldn't have to get that deep into the atmosphere to do the work.  Might be able to keep enough velocity to make escape not entirely in the realm of SF.

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Hydrogen is contained in the sulfic acid clouds, though enormous size of required balloons (to keep in air farms and factories) makes the whole idea hopeless.

Eh, if the folded envelope is stored on a smaller airship, deployment of such a large balloon could be feasible. Separate airships with oxygen would periodically dock to inflate it.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a hot air balloon be inflated, but it is by no means a one and done thing. Staged inflation is a possibility.

The main colony proposal I have seen envisions docking smaller platforms together anyways, not enormous singular ones.

That said, it is by no means economical.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

What if you had a SSFO?  Drop a spaceplane in until it's below plasma speed in the atmosphere, pump in the good stuff, seal it off and rocket back out again.  Given the density, you shouldn't have to get that deep into the atmosphere to do the work.  Might be able to keep enough velocity to make escape not entirely in the realm of SF.

The largest hybride airship evah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_10

Spoiler

90 m in length puny 10 t of payload.

2017.11.18 crashed after being gone with the wind. Just a terrestrial wind, not a usual Venusian hurricane.

I wonder how many 10 t airships is required to lift a farm (all its plants/cows/machinery/soil-or-hydropwnics) or a factory.

And btw how to cool the factory in the air (i.e. no effective radiation cooling) but without water (i.e. no heat sink).

And how much fuel would eat that spaceplane to service it.

If you mean that the colony should be hanging in orbit, then the mentioned diving plane should first aerobrake down the plane speed, then apply 8 km/s of delta-V to return to the orbit.

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

eployment of such a large balloon could be feasible. Separate airships with oxygen would periodically dock to inflate it.

See above. A ridiculous 10 t payload needs such large thing.

How many 10 t airships are required to the whole industrial and agricultural town, and how to keep together that flying continent of 100 m balloons.

Edited December 21, 2022 by kerbiloid

[AckSed]

There is another option for lifting gas: carbon monoxide. About the same lifting power as nitrogen, a product of multiple industrial processes including the extraction of oxygen from CO2, and an intermediary in extraction of carbon for all the graphene you'll need... and quite toxic, but you can't have everything. It can also be burned with O2 as a mediocre rocket fuel. (Or in a turboprop, for the control needed to travel between habitats and factory complexes.)

[K^2]

On 12/20/2022 at 11:42 AM, Shpaget said:

Hydrogen is the way to go. There is no oxygen in atmosphere of Venus, so it's not flamable. It is hard to produce, though, with all the lack of water we take for granted on Earth.

Sulfuric acid is trivially decomposed into water and sulfur trioxide. There is actually quite a bit of warer locked in Venusian atmosphere in this form at the sulfuric acid haze layer, which is about where you want to be for this.