NASA wants to send humans to Venus – here’s why that’s a brilliant idea

I'm skeptical about the idea of dropping astronauts into the Venusian atmosphere and then trying to get them out again. On the other hand I think maybe you could make a case for a manned Venus flyby mission. This would allow for teleoperated robots on the surface with relatively minimal latency over, say, a few days. This is good because you maximize rover effectiveness over the short period of time before the coolant runs out.

A flyby mission would only take something like 15 months which puts it within the maximum limit for astronauts to be in zero-gee. This would make a flyby mission much safer than a Mars mission because it's a lot shorter and doesn't even presume to make a landing (floating?). It might serve as a decent intermediate step between lunar missions and Mars missions.

Of course I'm personally looking for any good excuse to do any kind of manned mission that would get us out of low earth orbit, so I'm not completely objective.