10 Reasons Venus Isn't Totally Useless

[Rakaydos]

And plenty of sulfuric acid in the air Good luck strolling outside.

Why walk outside, when breathing air is your baloon's lifting gas? Let the machines convert that sulpheric acid into jet fuel, to get you back into orbit.

[SolarLiner]

Slingshots. The perfect planet for that.

It has the same gravity as Earth (well, almost), it goes faster than Earth (because it is closer to the Sun), so you can get more dV than Earth. Now Mercury would be an even better target for slingshots, but the Sun is playing against the spacecraft, and it is slightly smaller than Titan, so pretty hard to miss (and see how hard it is to get to Moho? Well, same applies for Mercury). That's not for nothing that almost all spacecrafts headed to the Outer planets (and further away) slingshot with Venus (Voyagers, Pioneers, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons).

And it is not called Venus for nothing

[Everten P.]

Dont forget helium 3 mining! Also Venus is good for finding a extremophile food crop through natural selection. Finding an extremophile food crop would be useful for colonizing planets like Venus in some ways!

[cantab]

I doubt anything capable of growing on the surface Venus will be edible by humans. Even the extremophiles on Earth deal with conditions that are nowhere near.

[Mr Shifty]

Indeed it is. A 1 km deep ocean floor on Earth has an ambient temperature of somewhere between 10-20^oC, so cooling systems simply need to transfer the heat outside. On Venusian surface, the ambient temperature is 460^oC, which means the cooling system now must work ridiculously hard to dump enough heat across the 435 degree gradient (assuming internal temperature of 25^o). Anyone walking there, no matter in what suit, will eventually die from the heat, as the cooling system gradually failed due to the immense load set upon it.

I'll agree that we're never going to walk on Venus, but I'm not sure the cooling requirements are all that unachievable. We can maintain oxygen in tanks in a liquid state here on Earth and the temperature difference is nearly as great (~300 degrees C.) You'd have to have a habitat, maintained near STP, to house equipment, a radiator block sitting (far) outside, connected by rigid umbilicals to the habitat, and surface excursions would probably have to be in a vehicle -- something like a bathysphere on treads -- that remains connected to the habitat by umbilicals to supply air and cooling (i.e. you wouldn't be going very far.) This whole apparatus would require tons of electrical power. Not sure where that's coming from, since solar power density is pretty low at the surface (though there are solar cells that would work there.)

[Ralathon]

I'll agree that we're never going to walk on Venus, but I'm not sure the cooling requirements are all that unachievable. We can maintain oxygen in tanks in a liquid state here on Earth and the temperature difference is nearly as great (~300 degrees C.) You'd have to have a habitat, maintained near STP, to house equipment, a radiator block sitting (far) outside, connected by rigid umbilicals to the habitat, and surface excursions would probably have to be in a vehicle -- something like a bathysphere on treads -- that remains connected to the habitat by umbilicals to supply air and cooling (i.e. you wouldn't be going very far.) This whole apparatus would require tons of electrical power. Not sure where that's coming from, since solar power density is pretty low at the surface (though there are solar cells that would work there.)

Liquid oxygen boils at 90 kelvin, room temperature is around 290 kelvin and the mean surface temperature of Venus is 740 kelvin... The difference between Venus and humans is more than twice the difference between humans and liquid oxygen.

In addition the venusian atmosphere is extremely dense, which means it transfers much more heat via convection and conduction. Keeping stuff cold on Venus is ridiculously hard. As in, you'd need a vacuum flask coupled with a powerful heat pump.