Sending Men To Venus |
Sending Men To Venus |
Jul 20 2005, 04:40 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 212 Joined: 19-July 05 Member No.: 442 |
While it is likely that future Venus missions will be robotic craft, at one point someone in NASA carried out an interesting contingency study on sending a manned craft to orbit Venus.
The file (Click here:Manned Venus Mission 1967) works on the assumption that either the NERVA project had been carried through to completion or that NASA had retained the capacity it was developing for Apollo. While the author does not rule out the possibility of a landing on Venus, he notes that owing to the unknown surface conditions they would be highly unlikely. Launch times are given as being between 1975-1986 and are designed to allow 40 days in orbit at Venus. As someone who was growing up during the period mentioned I would like to say that such missions would have been far more interesting than what actually occurred. |
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May 11 2006, 04:08 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 172 Joined: 17-March 06 Member No.: 709 |
I would like to mention one of my pre-occupations, namely the long-term terraforming of Venus. In that regard, I found Pete Worden's recent comments on building a shield, to deal with Global Warming, quite intriguing. You can read his comments here. http://spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1119 I find Pete's idea quite fascinating. He suggests that we could launch millions of small shields using material from the Moon. These shields would be positioned at the L1 point and block enough sunlight to cool the Earth. Now, consider this as applied to Venus. In order to allow manned inspection, and colonization, of the surface of Venus, we will need to do 2 things. First, lower the temperature and, second, decrease the surface pressure. A system of millions of small shields would do the trick. First, the temperature of Venus would need to be dropped to a level where the CO2 would freeze out, thus lowering atmospheric pressure. The surface could then be explored "in person." However, the landscape would be coated with a thick layer of dry ice. The next step to prepare for colonization would be to, somehow, get the dry ice to react to form carbonates. This part I have not thought through in detail. However, assuming that you could premanently sequester the CO2 as Carbonates, then one opens up a whole new Earth for colonization. This may take longer than terraforming Mars, but in the long term, I think that humans will prefer a planet with a surface gravity of 1g as opposed to 1/3g. Another Phil |
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