How the Soviets put a lander on Venus
asianometry.substack.com
asianometry.substack.com
In retrospect this does not seem THAT insane and I really do wonder why we have not focused more on Venus as a whole. It seems to me that in the long term it might be easier to terraform a planet like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars. Stripping something away is often easier than building it from scratch - and Venus has a whole lot of atmosphere on it!
It could also just be that my brain finds the idea of T-Rex's using their little tiny arms to operate computers and spaceships on the journey from ancient Venus to Earth extra hilarious.
it's all good until some protomolecule flies Eros into Venus and starts building the seed of a ring gate
For an (IMHO highly optimistic. It surely reads like science fiction to me) sketch of a plan from 1990 see https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/TerraformingVenusQuickly.....
It claims that, if we start in 2030, there can be ten billion people on Venus by 2200, and that the project can break-even by 2045 (after spending 150 billion British pounds)
That's .. not a lot. Not as much you might expect terraforming and colonising _another planet_ to cost over 15 years, anyway. The UK's annual budget is £770B.
The paper is light on details to start with, but doesn’t mention that at all. I think they build housing and sell it to people wanting to live there.
If it is the first one, that seems hard to calculate, because if you are extracting that many resources you are going to distort the market on earth.
You comment makes it seem like they will break even by selling houses on Venus? How can they possibly know the market for Venus housing?
And as I said, the whole paper is highly optimistic. They’re suggesting huge space colonies (“the terraformed Venus is unlikely to be fully occupied until the population of the space colonies reaches ~3×10¹⁰”. That’s about four times the current population of earth)
I think I’m not alone in not seeing us put “several small space colonies” in the orbit of Venus and construct “a heavy orbital ring around Venus” ten years after we started planning.
I guess they extrapolated exponential growth of everything imaginable.
One day on Venus is 224.65 Earth days. You won't be able to change that, even in the long term.
“It has until recently been assumed that the rotation rate or day-night cycle of Venus would have to be increased for successful terraformation to be achieved. More recent research has shown, however, that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not at all detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate would, given an Earth-like atmosphere, enable the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun. This in turn would raise planetary albedo and act to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the Sun.”
You still need to deal with the nasty chemical composition of the atmosphere, but that might be doable somehow. Your airship also needs to be massive and sturdy enough to shrug off hundred mile an hour winds.
The Chicxulub impact is estimated at 10^24-10^25 joules. So we need 10k-100k Chicxulub impacts in such a way that the energy is perfectly translated into Venus’s rotational energy.
That’s what, a billion tons of antimatter-matter reacting?
I don’t think we’re going to have a 24 hour day on Venus anytime soon.
My amateurish take on it - total effort to terraform Venus might be lower, however exploring/colonizing Mars is much easier.
Is there the idea of additive vs subtractive terraforming?
I agree on Venus. I have always felt it is much more interesting than Mars.
Make a floating city like Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.
I was convinced that its at least worth repeating, and that other people can tell me the problems with it.
Living in venerian cloud cities you won't even need a space suit to go outside, just a light breathing mask and a rubber suit to keep the acid away.
Venus is really close to us, comparatively speaking, and you won't even need a lander to get there. (You can brake against the atmosphere itself.)
The cloud city can be made of balsa wood and rubber, low-tech stuff.
Making the colony sustainable is another question, but it's not specific to Venus. Space is empty and pointless in general.
Contents: Balsa wood, rubber, screws, Alan key, instruction manual
(Assemble on a carpet to avoid damaging wood)
According to the Russian news service Ria Novosti, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who worked on unmanned Soviet missions to Venus during the 1970s and '80s, has written a new article in the journal Solar System Research. In the article, he calls attention to several objects photographed by the Venera-13 landing probe, a spacecraft that landed on Venus in 1982. The objects — including features described as a disc and a scorpion — appear to change locations from one photo to the next. "Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti stated, according to Ria Novosti. ... In one image, the Venera-13 landing probe is seen parked on the rocky Venusian foreground, and an object shaped somewhat like a crab stands inches from the probe. In another image, also taken by Venera-13, this crab-like object appears to be in a different location.
The claim was debunked; the evidence consists of image artifacts or mechanical pieces from the landers themselves: https://www.livescience.com/18083-life-venus-russian-claim.h...
I'm a little surprised we don't more readily explore Europa and Enceladus. They are far more interesting than Mars.
http://allreaders.com/book-review-summary/2061-odyssey-three...
EDIT: or maybe forget the aerostat thing and just put a satellite in orbit already. With a SAR.
We may have left a lander on the moon, but the Soviets put cameras on Venus. Checkmate.
First satellite: USSR
First animal in space: USSR
First person in space: USSR
First woman in space: USSR
First space walk: USSR
First space station: USSR
First photos from another planet: USSR
First person on the moon: USA
Stop the count!
Winner of the space race: USA
Not to mention for each of those firsts that USSR did US was not that much behind, and furthermore US did it over and over again with much more reliability than USSR.
10) Profit??
> The Roadster is in a heliocentric orbit that crosses the orbit of Mars and reaches a distance of 1.66 au from the Sun.[6] With an inclination of roughly 1 degree to the ecliptic plane, compared to Mars' 1.85° inclination, this trajectory by design cannot intercept Mars, so the car will neither fly by Mars nor enter an orbit around Mars.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster)
Not that we're competing. (And if we are, this is the very best kind.)
https://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/poll-fr...
Propaganda works kids.
STS-107-Space Shuttle Columbia, that's checkmate.
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/rocket-lab-venus-explaine...