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I voted for China, but I think they would only be first if the manned Martian mission is about 50 years off. If it happens sooner, it will probably be an international - US/Euro/Russian and maybe Japanese consortium.
An interplanetary craft doesn't need to look like a rocket - wrap your fuel tank around your living quarters!
Two more advantages of the floating roof concept: electical currents run through superconducting cables strung between the aerostats could form a protective magnetic field to keep out those pesky cosmic rays and could also be used to to transfer heat and light from the dayside to the nightside. You would end up with a 1400 hour day on the dayside and 58.5 24 hour days on the nightside. Essentially a two month hot season without nights and a two month cool season with earth cycle days and nights.
How about roofing over the planet?
As previous posts have pointed out, 50km up is a fairly livable environment in terms of temperature and pressure. So, why don't we seed Venus's upper atmosphere with self-replicating aerostats? The outer envelopes could be made from thin films of carbon nanotubules, made from carbon that is extracted from the abundant CO2 in the atmosphere. The excess O2 left over could be stored in the upper half of the aerostat to be used as a lifting gas. The lower half (or third or quarter) could be filled with an oxynitrogen mix and would be habitable.
The aerostats could also extract sulfer from the clouds and use it to coat the tops of the aerostats. This would serve two purposes: the light yellow color of the sulfer would reflect light out into space better than the black or greyish color of the carbon film of the aerostat envelopes and it would also reduce the amount of sulpheric acid in the clouds.
Over the course of a few centuries or decades or possibly years, the aerostats would multiply until the formed a continuous roof over the whole planet. Once they reached this point, the surface will start to cool down, partly because the roof will reflect most of the incoming heat and light, but also because the atmosphere will be slightly thinned out by the removal of so much carbon. Additional carbon could be removed by dropping carbon nanotube strings down to the surface, partly to anchor the roof into place, but mostly to remove more carbon from the atmosphere. Eventually these strings could be shortened and thickened into supporting columns.
Once we reach this point, we have two things that we need to address: what to do with all the extra oxygen we are generating and where to get hydrogen. Now, I'm going to presume that our technology will have progressed to the point where we can use the abundant solar energy available to our Venusian colonists to simply generate hydrogen - I must admit that I slept through my inorganic chemistry class at University, so maybe someone else can comment on the theoretical possibility or impossiblity of generating hydrogen from energy! The Oxygen and Hydrogen will combine to form oceans of surface water.
Utimately we will end up with roof in the venusian stratosphere (the areostats will automically descend as the atmosphere thins), all of the carbon sequestered in the roof or in the strings/supporting columns, an atmoshere composed of residual nitrogen and oxyen and oceans formed from the generated hydrogen and the native oxygen. Temperature could be controlled by adjusting the albedo of the roof.
The advantages of this idea are that the aerostats will form a planet sized liveable environment almost immediately and that the planetary cooling will not be dependant on an extraplanetary shield.
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