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.

Keep in mind that one of the main reasons for being hesitant to land men on Mars if we DO discover proof of either present or fossil life (which is virtually the only thing that could conceivably justify such a staggeringly expensive feat for at least the next 50 years) is that manned landers obviously cannot be sterilized -- which means that any attempt to use manned landers to study evidence of Martian life will disastrously contaminate the very thing they're trying to study. (I call "the Martian Catch-22.")

For this reason, it might be far more defensible to limit any manned Mars expeditions -- for a long time to come -- to orbiting the planet, so that the crew could teleoperate sophisticated sterilized surface rovers, sample-return landers, etc. without the lengthy radio time lag that makes it so extremely dificult to study any other planet by remote control directly from earth. But exactly that same kind of manned expedition -- a manned orbiter telecontrolling a large array of unmanned surface vehicles in a fast and efficient way -- could be used to explore Venus. So a manned Venus mission is not quite as crazy an idea as it might at first appear to be.

I don't think that a manned Venus mission would be either a crazy or fruitless idea, in fact a program of manned missions leading to an ISS style station in orbit around Venus as a permanent base for running remote surface surveys would have been a wonderful objective for NASA during the 'post-Viking' period.

But that would have required a degree of political backing that was sadly lacking during the 1976-1986 timeframe.

[...]

Shielding would have to be a part of the design, but even then, it's space, it's dangerous. I think the astronauts realize that, and I think people in general know that. I dare say that the danger is no small part of the appeal of exploration. If it were completely safe, it would also be completely boring.

Note that Venus actually includes environments where a non-spacesuited human can actually go outside. At (I don't have the exact number) about 50 or 55 kilometers altitude, the atmosphere temperature is about 70 F and the pressure is very roughly 1/2 atmosphere. The concentrated sulfuric acid clouds are actually a moderatly thick haze of 2 micrometer droplets with visibility of at least many hundereds of meters to a few kilometers

With a 40% oxygen/nitrogen air supply and goggles, and an acid blocking/neutralizing cream on the skin, and acid-resistant clothing, you could actually work on the outside of a "Buoyant Venus Station" for extended periods.

Here's a thought: Venus, at closest approach, is only about 100 times further away than the Moon, and about 25 times further away than Earth's furthest LaGrange point...

In his 1997 book Venus Revealed, David Grinspoon included a drawing of a proposed manned research station floating in the Venerean atmosphere.

Here it is:

http://www.funkyscience.net/imagebank/imag...archstation.jpg

He also has some interesting speculation on the life forms that might dwell in those "nicer" regions.

Larry Niven wrote a good short story back in the seventies about a manned landing on Venus, (who got stuck on the surface and had to find a way to get off). I beleive the main character had an environment suit that had a layer of liquid nitrogen in it so he could stay cool enough to walk around the surface for an hour or two...

Just so long as there's no light-sabre fights down near that downward-pointing antenna... ...gotta hand it to you, Dad (Ouch!)!

Dont worry, if there is a fight, the Millenium Falcon will come back and rescue Luke.

Just what the heck did hold up Bespin? Could anti-grav units really do the trick? And just what were they mining up there anyway?

And how can we relate this technology to a manned Venus platform?

I believe they were mining hot air, of which there was an impressive supply in the Star Wars saga.

The Niven story was "Becalmed In Hell", and he wrote it all the way back in (I believe) 1965. I don't remember any liquid nitrogen in that suit; what I do remember was that it was supposed to be only for emergency use because the joints tended to lock up after a fairly short time in that heat.

The story -- although it's often reprinted -- really was another demonstration (there were quite a few) of the fact that Niven, early in his career, was pretty much a scientific ignoramus. Consider: Venus is said to be pitch-black below the clouds (although, in that case, there's obviously no way the greenhouse effect could heat it up); they drop a "small probe" from the ship which is just an atmospheric probe (as if they wouldn't have done that countless times before dispatching a manned ship into the atmosphere); and there have been no unmanned surface landers before this expedition, with the result that our heroes are the very first to ever find out what Venus' surface actually looks like close up, or to obtain surface samples. Gaaakk! Amateur night.

Actually, there are a few people I would like to send to Venus. And strangely, most of them are men.

Phil

Venera 8 had reported rather dark skies in 1972, but at the time they didn't know it had landed when the Sun was only 5 degrees above the horizon.

And I also recall that they considered the refraction at the surface to be so intense that theoretically one could look all the way around the planet.

And one more - the original manned Mars missions of von Braun in the 1950s did not anticipate unmanned probes scouting the way to the Red Planet. The first closeups of the Red Planet would have been by ships full of men. And I mean just men.

I presume the story also did not anticipate the concentrated sulfuric acid?

You could always say it took place in an alternate universe where Venus wasn't quite as nasty as ours and space exploration involved few robot probes.

Well, remember that in 1965, our knowledge of the surface of Venus was very limited. Niven may have been only writting according to the latest information at that time, so I wouldn't call him an ignoramus!

Now if we could just get Ringworld to be stable

[...]

Circa 1995 I attended a friend's son's elementary school science fair in the Boston area. One child had an display on Earth's Moon and was using a book from 1963! The page he had it open to was the one about the three old scenarios of how Luna was formed (this was well before the impact theory).

I politely tried to explain to him about the new idea and that the book was rather outdated. He understood and accepted what I was saying, but it was also obvious that he couldn't just run off and make a new display. I was amazed that no parent or teacher cuaght this - but maybe I shouldn't be.

And then I encountered another display with an older student girl who had an outdated model of the Solar System. Somehow I got on the subject of other solar systems and extraterrestrial life with her, neither of which she somehow had even considered before. And this was not some rundown school in the middle of nowhere!

Oh, yes, the Niven story didn't mention the possibility of super-refraction producing a "bowl-shaped" surface on Venus -- buit then, that idea, which became briefly faddish in early 1970s SF (one of John Varley's first stories was "In the Bowl") turned out to be totally wrong as soon as the Soviets landed cameras. Indeed, it seems to be extremely hard to predict in advance the way an atmospheric planet's sky will look to a landed spacecraft; the various possible optical properties involved are just too complex, and very slight variations in them seem to have effects too great.

As for Venus' H2SO4 clouds: nobody seems to have guessed that one in advance before Earth-based studies nailed them in 1973 -- the closest anyone had come before was hydrochloric acid.

So Niven can hardly be blamed for missing those possibilities -- but he CAN be hammered, in no uncetain terms, for his portrayal of Venus as pitch-black below the clouds and his prediction that no unmanned landers would touch down before his crew did. Both those items, as I said, were violations of elementary scientific common sense, not subtle misses. (It's true that huge numbers of science writers had a strange blind spot in the early 1950s about unmanned probes showing us the vistas of new worlds before humans got there -- that turns up, in regard to the Moon's farside, in an Arthur C. Clarke story as late as 1957! Maybe they didn't want to believe it. But by 1965 there was no conceivable excuse even by that standard. Indeed, by 1963 Andre Norton -- not exactly the most scientifically reliable SF writer -- was writing about unmanned "peeper probes" being used to explore the past via time machine.)

If you haven't seen it, Voyage to the Planets and Beyond is a fun show about a 5-man mission to explore the planets. Produced by the BBC. They land on Venus, but not with anything that realistically could have done it. They show a sort of big LEM-like craft, which would never be able to get back into orbit.

A couple annoying technical mistakes: first they show (well in fact David Grinspoon claimed in the special festures) that you can see the surface from under the clouds. Not a chance. Purely from Rayleigh scattering, the visibility closes down to a matter of kilometers near the surface. V.I. Moroz first pointed that out, in an article about low-altitude balloon reconnaissance probes on Venus. Grinspoon also claimed the last spacecraft to land on Venus was Venera-14. (Can you actually make a documentary about space without having David Grinspoon or Neil deGrasse Tyson in it? Hehe.)

The Russians had a manned mission plan to Mars and Venus that was to be launched with the N-1: TMK-1.

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

It's going to take an awfully long time for a rock the size of Veus to cool enough to freeze CO2 I would imagine.

I remember reading (a long time ago) of another idea, that would have split the CO2 atmosphere into an O2 one with a lot (and I mean a lot) of carbon dust coving the surface, although quite how that helps matters I can't remember!

But anyway, why get rid of the atmosphere when it provides such a nice habitat at 50km...

http://powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publica...ony_STAIF03.pdf

James

I think Carl Sagan discusses this in Pale Blue Dot.

Phil

Wow, "cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus"...
This is an intriguing idea, it recall me the cloud city from "Empire Stikes Back"!

Saturn would be much more suitable for a floating city- you have plenty of raw material nearby (in the Saturnian moons) and gravity at reasonable atmospheric depths is still close to 1g.

Ah, I didn't realize Saturn is only 1.1 g. Still, it's pretty cold there.

The idea of building a thermal shield is actually Edward Teller's. He also proposed using dust in the stratosphere to fight global warming.

The time constant for Venus is about 100 years. If you could cut off enough sunlight, you'd have to wait a couple centuries for it to reach equilibrium again. I believe if you could get rid of the cloud cover, the cooling process would speed up some. At lower temperatures, some of the CO2 would start to be absorbed into the crust by the natural transformation of silicates into carbonates. That might take a long time. Some estimate that the Earth would have a sealevel pressure of 20 atm if all carbonates were broken down.

I'm not a big fan of short-term expensive one-time manned missions. I'm proud that we did the Apollo missions, but the cost was staggering -- more than 5 percent of the total federal budget was spent for several years. I don't even like the ISS.

But I am a fan of terraforming. I don't think human space travel will make sense until there is a real destination for people. A normal human being will go to Mars because he can live there, he can start a new life or be with people who already live there. People compare spacetravel to airtravel, but think about why airtravel is a big industry. I don't fly from Seattle to Minnesota to pick up a rock and them come home. I fly there to visit my family.

I think economics ultimately drives huge ventures. You just can't colonize a planet by pure romantic energy alone. You have to engage productive and practical people, who actually do things in society. It's basically a real estate development project, but what kind of financial instrument can you create that people will believe in, but which returns on investment in 200 years? There is a problem for you in applied economics: Mars Real Estate Futures!

Marco:

You're about a week late - this post *should* have been made on Bewithyou Day, which is the date immediately preceding May the 5th.

Bob Shaw

Rather than try to change an entire planet's ecosphere, how about we
change humans genetically to fit the environment?

If we could tailor-make people to survive on other worlds as they exist
now, we could have humans on virtually every world in the Sol system
and beyond. The future survival of our species would be assured.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedire...sID=5531&m=7610

That's an intersting idea, but I don't think you could breed people who breath CO2 instead of oxygen, or who could live at cryogenic temperatures or pyrolyzing temperatures. The chemisty of life is just impossible. The only life forms I could imagine would be machine-based, but not organic.

I'm all in favour of sending people to Venus, as long as I get to choose who goes! And I have a few candidates already.

Phil

So do I... we *are* talking about just sending them to Venus, right? Not worrying a wit about even *trying* to bring them back, right?



-the other Doug


Grrrooaannn...



-the other Doug

Here is a depiction of a manned USSF Venus expedition (you know
this because they wrote it in big red letters on the side of the ships)
from Erik Bergaust's 1962 children's book titled Space Stations:

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~jsisson/gifs/stat1.gif

If you haven't already, check out the Web site Dreams of Space with
all the glorious books from our childhood (or not):

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~jsisson/john.htm

When all spaceships looked like either V-2 rockets or tubes with balls
attached to them, the Moon was always craggy and the mountains sharp,
Earth never had clouds and always showed its Western Hemisphere, and
the daring astronauts were all brave, serious, and men. Except when they
depicted children, then it was usually a boy and girl travelling to the Moon
together.

Of course, those were also the days when every superhero worth his salt had a little boy and a little girl assisting him, too. James Thurber wrote: "I don't know what the parents of these children can be thinking of. When they should be at home or in bed or in school, they are usually trapped in a burning elevator shaft, or lying bound and gagged somewhere."

Kids get into the darnedest things when you're not keeping an eye on them

Click to view attachment

Wow! But wait! "The Monkey in the Rocket" here is illustrated by...no...it can't be!? Sergio Leone??

Andy G

Don:

Many thanks for posting an image with tentacles in it, especially of the deep, hungry, questing and wet variety! You have made my day!

Seriously, though, a number of years ago I was lucky enough to go on a day trip to the bottom of Loch Ness (yup, that one) in a decommissioned Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle. For some reason the DSRV had been sold for a song by the US Navy, and had found it's way to Scotland. Although designed to carry dozens of stranded submariners, it only carried six people on the trip I took, so it was seriously roomy and not in the least bit terrifying. The Tom Swift book cover made me chuckle, because although obviously a naive 1950s effort it nevertheless was a reasonably accurate prediction of what the DSRV actually would look like! Unlike most submarines, the DSRV actually had a big glass nose, lots of space, and even a baby conning tower - so maybe some more Tom Swift gadgets will come to pass!

Oh, and we saw no sign of anything monstery in Loch Ness; not a flipper, not a tentacle, not a thing!

Bob Shaw

While, we're wandering off on this somewhat irrelevant subject, Allan Steele -- who's written some fairly good hard-science SF stories about the future exploration of the Solar System -- did one for "F&SF" a few years ago about Tom Swift Jr.'s wastrel son Tom Swift III, who spends most of his time getting as high as a kite and accidentally activates Dad's Giant Robot to go on a rampage through the local town (whose name I can't quite recall -- "Swiftville", wasn't it? Makes you wonder how Tom Swift Sr. felt about unions.)

Eventually, however, Tom manages to rise to the occasion of getting the Robot back under control (thereby avoiding a longer jail sentence than he would otherwise have received), and resolves to straighten up and follow in Dad's footsteps. "Little did Tom know that soon his HYDROPONIC MARIJUANA CULTIVATOR would lead him into an exciting adventure in the South Pacific."

The problem is that the Loch Ness monster is visible only to BELIEVERS. Try harder, the next time.

Incidentally, there's a much more detailed file about a proposed NASA mission to Venus using Apollo hardware at:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1979072165.pdf

It's a while since I read through the whole thing (it's a couple of hundred pages) but from what I remember it didn't require any nuclear engines, just an uprated Saturn V (probably with solid boosters attached to the first stage).

It would be hard to get things to float on Saturn, given that the atmosphere is mostly hydrogen. Hot air ballooning would be possible, but still, you're not talking about much lift. On the other hand, a dense CO2 atmosphere has plenty to offer, even if you're using a breathable N2/O2 mix as the lifting gas. As for raw materials, future technology might allow for carbon nanotubes to form the shell of a buoyant structure, in which case the carbon could be mined from the atmosphere.

Then there is the weather... from what I know I'd rather take my chances above Venus than in Saturn.

And personally, I much prefer 0.9 g to 1.1 g, easy way to lose 20 lbs.

Mark:

Great link!

It's basically a plan to send a wet workshop S-IVB to Venus, with a new mission module between the S-IVB and the Apollo spacecraft. Included would also be one or more Venus probes. All in all, it looks like a comfortable way to fly to another planet - though the radiation discussion is quite scary (eye cataracts due to radiation damage would be no problem, as onset would be after mission end...). The Apollo SM might be provided with an SPS backup capability altered to use two LM descent engine packages instead of the SPS, and - oddly - the configuration at Earth departure would be similar to current Lunar EOR plans, with the CSM docked to the Mission Module and thus flying backwards. The development process included a test mission in high (25,000 miles) Earth orbit, and was seen as being linked to space station development too.

Is there a word for nostalgia for things which never took place?

Bob Shaw

Yeah, would have been an exciting trip if it had happened . I'd never really considered the radiation risks in that way, but I guess when you're in space for a year and going even closer to the sun there's always a strong risk of some kind of solar flare coming your way.

I'm trying to get that one simulated in Orbiter, but it will take a while.

Interesting ideas. The Russian spacecraft designer Gleb Maksimov also planned a series of nuclear powered "Heavy Interplanetary Ships" (TMK in Russian) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Click to view attachment

Personally, I'd be excited if NASA was building a ship like this, at least more than I am about us spending $100 billion on the ISS. I think there are two problems that have to be addressed. First, how do you prevent the astronauts from getting fried by charged-particle radiation? And second, can human beings actually do any solid science on such a missions, that couldn't be done more cheaply by robots?

Yeah, I think that's the real issue. Unlesss you're going to send humans to live for a long period on the planet with the capability to travel widely and perform experiments along the way, odds are robots will do the same job for much less money.

[...]

But perhaps it should. As you know, many Americans are not happy about ISS. We are spending most of the money on something that seems to just be a "feel good" political venture.

Enough with the anti-manned-spaceflight agenda?

Please?

-the other Doug

An opinion is not an "agenda". But since Bruce Moomaw was kicked off this forum for expressing that opinion, I guess I should watch out, eh? I don't think we should stifle people's opinions, just becaues we disagree with them. It is not an unusual opinion to think ISS is an unsound project.

I am not opposed to manned spaceflight. I am opposed to wasteful manned spaceflight. ISS is expensive and has little real scientific value. If nations were paying equally for it, I might feel better about the "Every country gets to have an astronaut!" concept. But ISS and the shuttle are a serious drain on NASA's resources now.

People should go into space when there is a real destination, not just as a publicity stunt. We should start thinking about robotic terriforming projects, for example. Or figure out a commercial value for space stations, like for example human entertainment.

The issue with Bruce Moomaw was not which opinion he held but the fact that discussions he participated in tended to become manned - vs - unmanned arguments, inspiring lots of ranting by him and others, regardless of the original topic under discussion. After discussion with the other admins Doug has decided that the debate isn't constructive toward the stated point of this forum -- discussing unmanned spaceflight. It's not that your or anyone else's specific opinion on the subject isn't 'approved' here; the whole discussion isn't approved, because it derails other discussions. Doug has asked people to refrain from beginning manned-vs-unmanned arguments, and has banned Bruce and others from the forum for failing, first, to honor that restraint and, second, to respond to his requests to desist. I'm sure each of us has a strong opinion on the topic but for the sake of this forum we are all being asked to follow the same rule and keep those opinions off the table.

--Emily