I'm bored. Let's plan a manned Venus landing.

[The Jedi Master]

Basically what the title says. Can we KSPers get around the whole thing about an acidic atmosphere and lots of volcanoes and lots of pressure and how hard it is to get beck, etc.? We will find out. Also, feel free to add whatever near-future tech you may wish.

First, I think we need to come up with a proper material. I would say diamond, but really, have you ever heard of a rocket made out of diamonds? Keep weight in mind, too.

Begin!

[Grove]

A blimp, it is too unsafe to be on the surface.

[The Jedi Master]

A blimp, it is too unsafe to be on the surface.

That's what we're trying to solve with this little project, remember?

[brooksy125]

Have a look at these vids:

From a bbc documentary/film thing contains some good ideas

[The Jedi Master]

Have a look at these vids:

From a bbc documentary/film thing contains some good ideas

The second vid is broken, but I've watched both before, very interesting.

[Stochasty]

My plan: pick some guy I can't stand (and I mean truly detest) and land him on Venus.

[The Jedi Master]

My plan: pick some guy I can't stand (and I mean truly detest) and land him on Venus.

Either the Kardashians or Justin Bieber.

Seriously, come on, guys, I was thinking we could work together on an awesome scientific analysis!

[zekes]

what about if you lived undergorund, you could use the acid to power some kind of life support unit.....

[Holo]

The first rule of landing on Venus is that you don't land on Venus. The second rule of Venus is that you don't land on Venus.

Your best bet would be to either remove the atmosphere or stay in its hospitable outer layers.

[BlazingAngel665]

Wow, everyone taking the easy route out eh? First you need to survive EDL. I would propose some form of two stage re-entry using lifting guidance like the techniques employed by Apollo and Curiosity. This give pinpoint landing accuracy for picking the most hospitable locations on the surface which would be prescouted using probes. This probes would also test techniques for withstanding the surface pressure and harsh environment. Parachutes would give easily enough drag to allow an unpowered descent.

Second is craft design. I would suggest a Bathysphere type design. Good for re-entry (proved by soyuz) withstands pressure well. Allows for a minimal number of facets for acid to cause trouble at. The only blemishes would be for extending legs, and the engine. A single airlock allows egress (more on this later). Comms would be established via a small ruggedized plastic balloon that would carry a wire aloft beyond the worst of the atmosphere. A rover could fold out from the lower regions of the sphere for extra mobility. The sphere would be large with two floors and an engineering section (containing three chemical rockets and a nerva that runs on gas extracted from the atmosphere during Venus Ascent)

EVAing would be less like wearing a spacesuit and more like donning a turn of the century diving suit. It will be very heavy. Maybe the exoskeleton could contain some servos to aid the astronaut?

Power would be supplied by the on board reactor that also runs the NERVA.

The stay would be short and after takeoff the craft would use a Mercury gravity assist to slingshot back to Earth, with a travel time of not more than 300 days. This limits radiation exposure. Th Bathysphere design inherently offers a fair amount of radiation protection due to the structural elements necessary for the atmospheric pressure on Venus.

Supplies would be freeze dried and stored maybe a small supplementary hydroponics lab but Venus is not going to permit any kind of inflatable habitat for growing food.

What do you think? Please give comments and criticism.

[jwenting]

remember that the dense atmosphere is in (large?) part offset by the lower gravity.

The main problem I think therefore isn't so much pressure (which can be overcome) but toxicity, radiation, heat, and possibly geological activity (aka volcanoes, quakes).

And the heat will likely cause rather violent atmospheric conditions, aka storms and maybe torrential toxic/acid rain.

So our habitats will need to have a very serious cooling system and be constructed of materials that can survive a toxic, acidic, boiling soup.

[kahlzun]

Materials that are resistant to oxidation:

Platinum

Gold

Noble Gases

already oxidised materials

Some ceramics

Some crystals

As mentioned above, heat would be a big concern: you need a method of dumping heat from the pod, and so you'd need something hotter than the surrounding environment, or some kind of solvent which is dumped into the surrounding area, in order to keep cool.

The timescale of a landing, with current or near-future technology, would not exceed minutes or hours at most.

So, a rocket made of something with high heat (tungten ceramic perhaps), possibly with a crystalline coating (quartz or something).

Some kind of active cooling system, possibly using something with a high heat capacity, like liquid lithium, which has the heat from the cooling system pumped into it, and then the hot liquid is sprayed out of the lander. Will crunch the numbers on efficiency later.

[MATH]

Ok, you can heat Lithium up to about 1600 K before it starts to evaporate, which is a LOT hotter than the surrounding countryside, even on Venus (~740K).

Perhaps you would have tubes of liquid lithium running around the outside of the ship, towards the top, both to protect from landing, and because heat rises: which will help trigger an updraft around the ship, giving further cooling.

Assuming a perfect heat dump into the lithium, and sufficient liquid mass, you could easily chill the ship to room temperature.

[/math]

Gravity is roughly analagous to Earth's (8.87 ms), so you'd need some kind of braking method, parachutes or balloons recommended due to mass and thickness of atmo, keep in mind Venus has a low wind speed, but a lot of force, so you'll need some protection against lateral motion.

Edited June 16, 2013 by kahlzun

[Felsmak]

First, I think we need to come up with a proper material. I would say diamond, but really, have you ever heard of a rocket made out of diamonds?

A rocket made of diamonds? That sounds truly outrageous.

[MBobrik]

Landing and surviving on venus would be hard but not completely impossible. Pressures are like on the bottom of deep ocean trenches, and temperatures can be solved by active cooling. You will have however, to build an external reactor that will operate at ambient pressures and because the cooler will be at ambient temperature, the reactor itself will have to work at @ 1900 k to maintain temperature gradient enough to power a monstruous refrigerator that keeps the rest of the ship at survivable temperatures. And of course the only thing that can get you back is nuclear powered jet. EVA however, would be a very short and painful one way trip.

Edited June 16, 2013 by MBobrik

[Kerbface]

Just a thought, given Venus's atmosphere, mightn't it be possible to land mostly with a balloon to slow descent, and in the same way use a balloon to rise above the surface? While the craft is landed, the balloon could be compressed into tanks and then it could be uncompressed when it's time to leave? Not for the full distance, but enough that it would drastically use the amount of fuel and rockets required.

[MBobrik]

Just a thought, given Venus's atmosphere, mightn't it be possible to land mostly with a balloon to slow descent, and in the same way use a balloon to rise above the surface?

.

Problem is with materials that can be made thin and strong at temperatures ~750 K.

[Kerbface]

.

Problem is with materials that can be made thin and strong at temperatures ~750 K.

Oh yeah, that. XD

[The Jedi Master]

Blazing Angel, that is the best response so far. Let's keep getting ideas, this could get interesting!

[metaphor]

Just a thought, given Venus's atmosphere, mightn't it be possible to land mostly with a balloon to slow descent, and in the same way use a balloon to rise above the surface? While the craft is landed, the balloon could be compressed into tanks and then it could be uncompressed when it's time to leave? Not for the full distance, but enough that it would drastically use the amount of fuel and rockets required.

A balloon would be the best way to do it. Even nitrogen and oxygen are lifting gases in Venus's carbon dioxide atmosphere. You could use a rigid envelope and would not need parachutes. After slowing down from reentry, fill the balloon halfway with nitrogen at around 20 km altitude to allow for a very gentle landing. Terminal velocity on Venus is only about 5-10 m/s. Then after the surface stay, to go back up fill the balloon to full and float up to 50 km.

Since you need about 7-8 km/s delta-v to get to low Venus orbit, you would have to use a different return rocket that is waiting at 50 km. At 50 km altitude, the pressure is 1 atmosphere and the temperature is about 20 degrees Celsius. The return rocket would use a big inflatable balloon to stay up at that height. It would have to be a pretty big multi-stage rocket, with a very small capsule, Dragon-size or smaller. Once the crew used the return rocket, they would meet with the interplanetary stage and deep space habitat in low Venus orbit, and use them to return back to Earth.

So let's see, if you have a 50-ton Deep Space Habitat, a 80-ton Venus lander, and a 5-ton Venus return capsule...

Total mass launched into low Earth orbit would be around 600 tons, or 6 SLS-sized launches.

Launch 1 - 110 tons - Venus lander + heatshield (for braking into Venus' atmosphere)

Launch 2 - 110 tons - Venus orbit return rocket + heatshield

Launch 3 - 115 tons - Earth departure stage 1

Launch 4 - 115 tons - Earth departure stage 2

Launch 5 - 90 tons - NERVA rocket + Venus arrival stage + Venus departure stage

Launch 6 - 60 tons - Deep Space Habitat + Earth Return Vehicle

The stack would be assembled in LEO. It would use a nuclear thermal rocket engine with 1000s Isp for the interplanetary journey. It would use 230 tons of fuel to leave LEO, with 370 tons to a Venus transfer orbit. It would reach Venus 4 months later. The Venus lander and the Venus orbit return rocket would separate and enter Venus' atmosphere right away. After ditching the 30 ton heat shield, the Venus lander would land on the surface. After ditching its 30 ton heat shield, the Venus return rocket would inflate its balloon to stay at 50 km altitude. The rest of the 150 ton stack would use propulsion to break into low Venus orbit, using 45 tons of fuel, leaving 105 tons in Venus orbit (with 1 crew). The Venus lander crew (2 people) could probably only stay on the surface a relatively short time, since they would need a high power source to cool their surface habitat. So let's say they stay 20 days on the surface.

To get back up, they use the lander's flotation device to ascend to an altitude of 50 km and meet up with the return rocket. They transfer to the return capsule along with ~100 kg of Venus rocks. The 80-ton Venus orbital return rocket is a 2-staged liquid hydrogen/oxygen fueled rocket (Isp ~ 400s). The 5 ton minimal Venus return capsule would enter low Venus orbit and rendezvous with the orbiting habitat. The crew and the Venus sample then transfer to the deep space habitat and ditch the Venus return capsule. Then they would use 40 tons of fuel to get on an Earth return trajectory. The Earth transfer would take about 10 months (using one of these trajectories). A couple of days before arriving at Earth, they would get in the 10 ton Earth Return Vehicle and separate from the rest of the spacecraft. The rest of the stack would fly past Earth, while the capsule would aerocapture and land on the Earth with the crew.

That's a 1.3 year mission with 2 people landing on the surface and 1 person waiting in Venus orbit. That's the overall mission architecture, there's still the small problem of designing a 80-ton lander that can withstand pressures of 100 atmospheres and temperatures of 500 degrees Celsius for a few days...

Edited June 16, 2013 by metaphor

[epicunicorn]

We have sent probes to Venus, the problem with a manned mission is that we couldn't store the food needed to go that far. The people manning the mission would starve. But about a year ago a man is Sweden was able to survive without food for 2 months by going into human hibernation. If we could learn how to put people into this state we may be able to go farther into space without the need to store large amounts of food and water. Making it possible to go to Venus, or other planets. The other problem is that anything that we can make a rocket out of would melt in about 2 hours. But we could sent the astronauts there and later send another rocket to pick them up. we would just need something that wouldn't melt to make the space suits out of.

[jwenting]

yes, The Soviets sent their Venera probes which survived for some (very short) time on the surface).

So take that as an absolute minimum for structural strength and improve on it, run several unmanned missions to ensure the validity of the design, then scale it up to manned, send that unmanned a few times to see if it still works, and then, maybe, send a manned mission (or send one with a load of gerbils and raccoons first to see if those survive until their food runs out).

[Themohawkninja]

I have yet to see anyone acknowledge (let alone solve) the issue of the EVA (why else would you land people on the surface, if not to explore it by foot/manned rover?) You would need some sort of suit that is air tight, insulated from the heat, and has on-board oxygen tanks (I doubt you could engineer a re-breather to filter out all the harsh chemicals). The best thing I can think of, is something analogous to a Terran Marine from the StarCraft series.

[czokletmuss]

But why land there in the first place? This is like a manned mission to acid vulcano; Venus is much less hospitable than Mars without any of its advantages, so I doubt that anything alive will ever land there.

[ZingidyZongxxx]

I think one of the main problems with landing on Venus is how big a lander would have to be. Denser atmosphere and close to the same gravity means that we would need to transport a massive rocket just for the landing, not to mention the return stage and the stage to get there. I suppose a multi-launch mission, possibly with an assembly in orbit, might solve this though.

[The Jedi Master]

But why land there in the first place? This is like a manned mission to acid vulcano; Venus is much less hospitable than Mars without any of its advantages, so I doubt that anything alive will ever land there.

I decided to ignore that little tidbit because it's not the point. The point is, if we DID go there, what would the mission look like?

If you really want a reason, then I say, "Because we can."