Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus
mentallandscape.com
mentallandscape.com
I've wondered if a modern day manned flyby mission might make sense. A rover could be landed on Venus more easily than on Mars, but it would, by necessity, have a very short lifetime on the surface. Once it's out of coolant, the mission is over. So if you were going to land a rover (or rovers) on the surface of Venus, you'd need to maximize their effectiveness. One way to do this would be to teleoperate them in near real-time, which could be done if rover landing were coordinated with a manned flyby.
A manned flyby of Venus would be substantially cheaper and less risky than a manned mission to Mars. There's no manned landing component, and the flyby mission itself would take a little over a year, which is pushing the limit for human exposure to micogravity, but within the range that we have actual experience.
This kind of mission will, of course, only make sense if you are an advocate of manned space exploration in the first place.
Absolutely no convincing long term value, but we just have to do it, just because we can. No asteroids to mine, no Mars bases to build, but "what happens if we go over there and look"
Gets my vote.
NASA clearly needs an intermediate step between LEO and putting a man on Mars. Venus flyby plus teleoperated rovers is the easiest mission I can think of that might also be useful.
We are never going to get outside the solar system in any meaningful way unless physics changes a lot, so any exploration of our backyard will be valuable.
I just think any attempt beyond the traditional approach will benefit the soul of the human race, as much as it will give us Teflon.
I totally agree with you there.
I'd agree with the both of you on the value of big space exploration projects as driving our culture.
http://donpmitchell.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/heavy-interplan...
However, the Atmosphere composition makes it worse.
Oh brother, can't I vote for him ?
For example the Vostok spacecraft (Gagarin) is still used on orbit 50 years latter for biological experiments.
(kudos on the probe history, though, as the US has largely ignored Venus, Magellan not withstanding)
Hopefully one day such a society will emerge again, and this time they will not dismantle themselves over having Coke and Levi's. Having lived in USSR -- no, we seriously didn't break up because of human rights issues. We just simply wanted Coke and Levi's.
Life was pretty good for me and my family; not so good for my friend, who had to share a two bedroom apartment with two other families.
(I feel that books, movies, etc. are pretty subjective - I like the flood of post-modern shit we live in. You might have to dig a little harder to find diamonds, but there are more of them.)
Unless you're Jewish.
Arguments much?
In any case, alright; some Jewish scientists did fine. Others didn't. We can praise the things the USSR did well without white-washing its history altogether.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--...
And you can feel free to arrange your own little Soviet state. For my part, my marxist views would most likely have gotten me sent to Siberia or worse, so I'd much rather stay clear.
All: this indignant political subthread is off topic.