Mission to Venus

Void · 2015-01-10 09:02:28

I believe you are thinking well for the starting intent of this thread.

I was exploring what I thought was an alternative potential utilization future for humans at Venus. Without such a potential, it would be pointless to put humans into the atmospheric envelope. I am satisfied that there will be potential, and I will get into your frame of mind as much as I can to discuss your points.

You did well identifying L2 as an Earth orbit similar environment near Venus. That suggests that the hardware utilized in the Earth/Moon environment will be more likely to behave in a familiar fashion. That would be important for long term planning.

Since we may think that Venus may have genuine material potential to enhance the material and spiritual character of the human race. A human mission to the Venus L2 does make sense, to work with machines sent into the Venus environment. It may be fortunate that such a mission might utilize machines currently in production for experiments with capturing small asteroids, and also for going to Mars.

Void · 2015-01-10 09:09:29

In my previous post I mostly agreed with you Tom, that it might be possible to think of a human visit to L2 to support a deeper exploration of Venus by machines. That would be supported by scientific desire to learn. Knowing what is real, helps us identify what is real in other aspects of our lives. Such science might also reveal through gathered information useful industrial processes. Since Venus is an alien environment, it's process may reveal things we did not think of or stumble upon before. So, for that reason, alone such a mission may be worth the costs.

So, then you have had your mission to Venus with machines, supported by humans in Venus_L2. Now what?

You can try to get the humans back to Earth and be done with it or can Venus_L2 become a hub for the development of Venus_All?

Humans can send hardware and materials from the Earth/Moon domain to Venus_L2, but they can also send such to a broad range of solar locations in the approximate orbital halo that the Earth/Moon travels in around the sun.

It is proposed to capture asteroids, small ones in the location of Earth/Moon for materials. That could be done in Venus_L2, but why bother to do it there if you could do it in the Earth/Moon location?

It could be proposed that the Venus effort could borrow lots of money from the human race and promise to pay back with interest at some time several centuries from now when Venus has been developed to produce a profit, but I don't believe that there are any banks that would make such a loan.

But if you could utilize the L2 location to support the capture of gasses in the comet like tail of Venus, then you might have more of a pay-as-you-go situation. L2 then might have material goods to sell to the Earth/Moon.

Of course it would have to be of a better quality/price than what could be gotten in orbits of the Earth/Moon.

So far, atmospheric gasses from the Earth are expensive, very expensive. Proposed gasses from the Moon suggest Oxygen to be the easiest to obtain. But landing, extracting, and bringing it to orbit are also going to be expensive. It is possible that there might be possibility to extract Argon from wells on the Moon, but that is not proven, and again it is going to be dangerous, because it almost certainly requires a human presence.

Then there might be asteroids captured in the Earth/Moon orbits. Gasses from them could very likely out compete gasses captured from Venus_Tail. But that is not a sure thing. Interestingly, however, if asteroids can be captured into the Earth/Moon, it should make the space orbital presence of humans so much larger, that eventually they will spill over into Venus_L2.

And if that does happen, I would think that capture of gasses from Venus_Tail will be their first economic effort.

You know I am getting tired of typing Earth/Moon. Maybe someone could come up with a single name for our sort of binary planet?

Last edited by Void (2015-01-10 09:34:28)

Void · 2015-01-10 09:33:24

Tom you are correct that the machines that have been sent and are likely to be sent in the next few decades deteriorated/will deteriorate rather quickly in the atmospheric environments of Venus. I will leave the acid clouds alone, and focus on the dry Troposphere. Materials for the acid clouds is another issue.

However, I recall that supposedly the mountains of Venus are higher then they should be because the Troposphere is dry. The rock is stiffer without moisture.

So, this suggests that humans have not yet created materials which can last in the Venus_Troposphere(s). For some materials the heat may not be a large challenge.

But it seems that the troposphere and the surface need to be divided into two domains. Troposphere_Condensate, Troposphere_SuperCritical, Surface_Condensate, Surface_Supercritical.

I am going to leave behind Troposphere_SuperCritical & Surface_SuperCritical.

I am very interested in Troposphere_Condensate & Surface_Condensate.

As far as I can see, it is a domain where pressure is >12? Bars and 88? Bars< (Roughly).

Clearly it is all very hot, and the atmosphere is so dense that it suggests the use of flying/floating robots.

It almost certainly excludes the presence of sane humans, and I don't see how our current semi-conductor technology could function there without continuous refrigeration of some kind.

If you just used Venus_L2, and forgot about Venus_Airship for a while, you might hope to master Venus_Surface_Condensate & Venus_Troposphere_Condensate by using wind as your energy source.

Robots would most likely as you have suggested be second bodies for a human or computer at a more favorable location. Perhaps Venus_L2, perhaps Venus_Airship.

Robots by definition have the human property of motion (Which is also related to manipulation of objects, and Violence). In order to have motion they have to have energy.

If you skipped the Airship concept for a time, and had a list of materials which could survive at Venus_Surface_Condensate, you might be able to harness the wind to power your robots. The method might involve liquifying a gas in the atmosphere, then feeding that into the robots to be boiled like a steam engine/turbine.

As you have previously indicated weather on Venus might be a challenge. It would be the same everywhere, because Venus_Surface_Condensate includes all the highlands which includes mountains (Changes in altitude), and differences in latitude.

By using the method Venus_L2 & Venus_Surface_Condensate, it might be possible to build Bean Stocks up to the clouds, and to then tap the Sulfuric Acid/ H20 mix, and to then make the clouds less acid. By this method humans would not be exposed to the acid environment until it has been buffered sufficiently. Then when they did inhabit the clouds, it would be more favorable, and they would in fact have a vast array of robot actuators to produce materials for them to use from the surface.

During the development of Venus_Condensate(s), no rockets to orbit from Venus would be required, except perhaps for some sample returns.

So then communion between Earth/Moon and Venus_L2, and a one way trip for a directed replicating machine culture to Venus_Condensates(s), which would eventually project into the clouds of Venus to receive humans.

Now I am done

Last edited by Void (2015-01-10 10:16:07)

Void · 2015-01-10 10:16:39

Good suggestion K_Tom

SpaceNut · 2015-01-10 12:45:58

Well the depth of the atmospheric pressure of Venus is not a problem when we look to the oceans of earth as we can explore to crush depths with submarines, so we need to design for just that if we want to be on the surface and that means nuclear powered as the first step in design. Hull design for survivability is second and then science is created for what can be fit in to the design.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-10 12:52:59

The thing Venus has going for it is its atmosphere, this allows asteroids to be captured, and we don't dare do this with Earth's atmosphere. Venus is a dead planet, people are not likely to live on its surface for a long time. Mars on the other hand people might want to develop. L2 has other uses as well, it is dynamically unstable, if you give an object from it a little nudge, it can be sent with gravitational assist back to Earth An object orbiting around the Sun at L2 is moving faster because of the addition of Venus's gravity than it should be at that distance from the Sun with the Sun's gravity alone. Push something at L2 and it will move away from Venus and go into an elliptical orbit around the Sun, the L2 point will be the low point in its orbit. If you push it in the right orbit, it can make another close pass to Venus and it can be sling shotted back to Earth with the minimal amount of propellents used. Some people were talking about building a space station at Earth's L2 point for that reason. So lets see, We nudge asteroids out of the Asteroid Belt and it falls towards the Sun, on the right path it will graze Venus's atmosphere which will slow it down, by fine tuning its orbit, it can be brought precisely into an L2 Halo orbit. we can process this material with solar power from the Sun, and then when were done, give this materials a little nudge and it can fall towards Earth, the Moon, or perhaps even Mars. If we miscalculate and the asteroid hits Venus, we lose the asteroid, but that's about it, no one on Venus to complain. Maybe we'll get a Venusian "Nuclear Winter" That might be interesting. Perhaps more water would be added to Venus' atmosphere if it was the right kind of asteroid, that would make it easier to inhabit the upper atmosphere. The water would tend to stick around for quite a while, it has no place to go after all, it can't reach the surface, it will evaporate and recondense as water cloud droplets, some of it might get disassociated by the sun, but that takes time. Venus rotates in the opposite direction of its orbit. It orbits counter-clockwise but rotates closkwise, and Asteroid that Hits Venus would probably slow down its rotation slowly, that might be useful! Imagine if we slowed Down Venus's rotation so that if had a Solar day of 360 Earth days, in a later terraformed Venus, 180 of those days would be the growing season, while night would be "winter", this might be better than giving the planet a tilt and a 24 hour day, because then the planet would have a shorter growing season. Also animals that migrate on a future Venus would migrate from West to East, it should be fairly easy for them to stay in the day lit portion of the planet. Venus has a lot of small continents and islands, once an ocean is established. Fish and birds would migrate around the planet arriving just as plants grow fruit and berries.

Lots of land, more coastline than Earth probably means more habitable land than Earth, fewer deserts.

SpaceNut · 2015-01-10 15:23:54

Great Venus image of a future Venus.

My concern with a venus L2 mission is Radiation.

Surviving Space Radiation is NOT an Option

VL2 Radiation

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-10 22:42:23

The other reason for going to L2 is that it is the easiest spot in the Venus system to return astronauts from, there is very little of the Venusian gravity well to climb out of, and the gravity of Venus holds a space ship at L2 at a higher velocity than normal for a circular orbit around the Sun at that distance, one could practically fall towards Earth from VL2.

Void · 2015-01-11 12:30:21

That vision of Venus requires a lot of time and effort expended to get something that may not be possible. The people expending the time and energy would not get paychecks in their lifetimes for the work done. I still believe that if you put a lot of water on the surfaced of Venus, you would get Super Volcano's, Volcano's, lots of quakes, etc.

For that kind of terraform, would it be 100,000 years, or 1,000,000? O.K., if unknown super technologies can be discovered, then I will relent.

As for Venus_L2, I do see your concern Spacenut, and Tom, I still admire your craft for seeing Venus_L2's values.

Here is how I would address it Spacenut. First of all, I am going to presume that during the next 30 years, human technology continues to advance including A.I.

I Would start with an A.I collection at Venus_L2, to direct robots about Venus_All. The Venus_L2 A.I. would be upgraded with hardware additions from the Earth/Moon as desired.
Humans of Earth mostly would program the Venus_L2 A.I.

We can see that Mars rovers are becoming autonomous, I presume to larger degrees as time passes, and lessons are learned, and software innovations are created.

I would presume that at some point rather than humans planning a next move for a rover, the Venus_L2 A.I. would. The humans of Earth would simply structure the A.I. so that it could do these tactical tasks. Presumably the humans would instruct the A.I. on general plans.

So at that stage, radiation will not be an issue since no humans are likely to be hosted at Venus_L2 for very long.

But;
If small asteroid capture is mastered in the Earth/Moon subsystem, (Mirth?), and if methods to capture ions from the plasma tail of Venus can be devised, then there might be an economic model for humans to be hosted in large numbers in Venus_L2.

If true where asteroids are captured, and ions are captured from the Venus_Tail, then shielding will be available to protect from radiation. Silicates, Metals, and Hydrocarbons, such as Paraffin Wax. I would think that hollow worlds made of such materials and having synthetic gravity would then be possible.

So, as far as I can see, there are three best places to begin human activities either with humans or their machine proxies. Orbital, Cloud, and surface for Venus_All.

Tom appears to have found the sweetest spot for orbital, which is Venus_L2

To me Cloud allows humans to enter, but it is hard to get the humans back to orbit, and there is no point in getting them down to the surface, unless you want to cremate them. Machines in the clouds have little resources to expand with. They can most likely be placed there from orbit, or from the surface of Venus, but once there, other than information relays, or possible Sulfuric Acid/H20 collectors, and weather forecasting, they would have little purpose.

While Venus_L2 was being developed (if possible), you could try to have a surface machine culture under development. For early probes, a power system like Curiosity might pay off, presuming that you could make the robots life span long enough.

Later a scheme might involve landing a stationary nuclear reactor somehow, and have it manufacture liquid C02 and/or N2, which could be injected into steam powered robots. An alternative to that would be to land a windmill, which it might be noted might be able to rotor down to the surface, and use it's rotor to collect power to again manufacture liquid C02 and/or N2, which could be injected into steam powered robots. The Liquid CO2 would suit surface robots, the Liquid Nitrogen would suit flying robots, which could use floats filled with Nitrogen to rise (The exhaust from their engines), They could also have propellers, wings, and perhaps wings like birds.

Perhaps you could make a Tinker-Bell robot. Tinker-Bell in Hell

Tinker-Bell (Or a more sensible flying robot), could move all the way from the surface, through the clouds, and above the clouds I think.

So, all the flying Fairy robots could build things in the clouds, and perhaps even manage to build and maintain a bean stock to the clouds from the surface, provided that materials suitable for such robots are possible, will endure the environment, and provided the wind conditions are not too harsh.

And I say that it would be better for the human race if it can manage to do it this way, because along they way they will have mastered new environments, and created new technologies that would be useful for their presumed future elsewhere.

Last edited by Void (2015-01-11 12:58:39)

SpaceNut · 2015-01-11 13:39:06

So the AI machines and lots of equipment is all unmanned for decades from now until man can go safely.

Would that make the L2 a good location to make a fuel depo as venus is plentiful for atmospheric harvesting for raw capature or processed materials? What then is needed is a docking location on the blimp for the rocket to return to L2 to for unloading and for it to return to in order to get refilled with the cargo we would want. This cargo depo then could be ion propelled to Mars for future use.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-11 15:48:47

Void wrote:

That vision of Venus requires a lot of time and effort expended to get something that may not be possible. The people expending the time and energy would not get paychecks in their lifetimes for the work done. I still believe that if you put a lot of water on the surfaced of Venus, you would get Super Volcano's, Volcano's, lots of quakes, etc.

The paychecks would be derived from manufacturing. Pieces of asteroids would be shipped to L2, and manufactured into finished products and then ships to their destinations in the Solar System The Venus system is just a collection point for materials mined in the asteroid belt.

Impaler · 2015-01-11 16:17:05

Void when you say L2, do you mean Sun-Venus L2? I don't really see any advantage to going to that spot, it has higher radiation then being in low orbit of a planet, and it has the same angular speed around the sun as Venus itself so it dose not seem to be much easier to get to or from then Venus itself.

The links that SpaceNut provided earlier on Radiation, I tried to read them but the author is totally rambling and incoherent and seems to be throwing around conspiracy theories, I wouldn't trust any judgments made in them.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-11 17:23:47

Impaler wrote:

Void when you say L2, do you mean Sun-Venus L2? I don't really see any advantage to going to that spot, it has higher radiation then being in low orbit of a planet, and it has the same angular speed around the sun as Venus itself so it dose not seem to be much easier to get to or from then Venus itself.
The links that SpaceNut provided earlier on Radiation, I tried to read them but the author is totally rambling and incoherent and seems to be throwing around conspiracy theories, I wouldn't trust any judgments made in them.

It is 1 million kilometers further out from the Sun than Venus and traveling in a larger near circle than Venus at the same angular speed, since it has to sweep out a greater distance in the same amount of time with a larger circumference to cover, it is in fact traveling faster than Venus, and as you know object in further out circular orbits around the Sun travel slower than those closer it, it is only the combined gravitational pull of Venus and the Sun together which hold objects at the L2 spot in a circular orbit at that distance. If you push an object at L2 further away from the Sun, Venus will recede and its gravitational pull will diminish by the square of the distance from Venus faster that it would diminish as it pulls away from the Sun, since the object would be traveling faster that the orbital speed in a circular orbit would dictate, then that object's orbit would become elliptical with the point at around the L2 point being Perihelion, and the rest of its orbit will take it further away from the Sun and thus closer to Earth Orbit, If Earth is in the right place, that orbit, with a few adjustments can take it to Earth with a minimum amount of propellant expenditure. L2 is dynamically unstable, move towards the Sun and Venus and you will be pulled more in that direction s gravity gets stronger, move away and as gravity gets weaker, you will fall away from the Sun, that is the value of Venus L2.

Impaler · 2015-01-11 18:58:31

Yes you indeed to have a bit more energy at that point then you do at Venus but you seem to be implying it is nearly equal to an Earth-orbital energy and that it is virtually free or super cheap to go between Sun-Venus L2 and Earth (or maybe Sun-Earth L1 which would be closer). I will need to see some numbers to be convinced of that, Venus is normally 108 million km from the Sun so an additional million is hardly any difference at all, I can't see this being remotely the effect your attributing to it. I think your misapplying the Earth-Moon Lagrange dynamics in which the bodies are much closer in mass and the Lagrange points are considerably further from the moon. In the Lagrange points between planets and the sun are so close to the planets they can effectively be considered to be ON the orbit of the planet.

And I still do not see the point of going to and stopping at this point on the way to and from Venus, just because I have access to stopping point part way through my trip to/from Venus I'm not saving any total DeltaV because I'd still need to go down into and out of Venus gravity well. And because it co-rotates with Venus it's got the same synod cycle with respect to Earth. Are you imagining this as some kind of position for a free floating colony?

Void · 2015-01-11 19:26:29

Impaler, Hi.

I am interested in the Venus_L2 that Tom seems to indicate may exist. Although Tom likes the orbital/energy situation, primarily I was attracted to two potential factors. 1) Venus_L2 is reportedly partially shaded by Venus, to have a luminosity similar to Earths? 2) Venus has a tail, I want to harvest ions from it and since the solar wind may push those ions from Venus to Venus_L2. That is a hope. I know this kind of thinking drives you crazy, because you are so tuned to precision, but a broader view with some fuzzy thinking can get you to an approximate hope. Then you can analyze the situation and see how real it could be. If it were true that Venus_L2 has a similar solar flux to that of Earth orbit, then I might hope that machines designed to work in Earth orbit but placed in Venus_L2 will be more likely to preform as expected, with fewer unexpected mechanical failures than if you were putting them in a X2 luminosity. I do understand that unlike low Earth orbit, Venus_L2 is not very radiation protected.

Last edited by Void (2015-01-11 19:30:43)

Void · 2015-01-11 19:52:55

Tom, I guess I see that as a pretty good answer.

However, I do see that you have not yet decided to investigate what Venus could do for the human race more immediately.

But I will also confess the robot surface and flying robot thing is pretty tentative. I do not have enough information on wind energy, and materials which could be used, but of course you have to think of something in a broad way before you get down to the details, and find out yes or no it could work.

But if it did work it would not preclude that ultimately the humans in control could choose to fully terraform Venus to resemble the Earth. However that would be a lot of work with very time delayed payback, and Venus is not really understood well enough to be certain that it could be done, even with 100,000 to 1,000,000 years to do it.

Personally, if I could manage to have confidence in a surface and flying robot community, and bean stalks or some variant that gives similar results, then ultimately I would consider a shell world, where in one option, 1/2 bar of Nitrogen and Oxygen was above the shell, and everything else below. Since U.V. would be blocked from interacting with the Sulfur compounds, Acid Rain would be much reduced. Granted Venus has quite a wind problem and I bet the loads would be horrific. But it is something to think about. Other problems might be snow building up on the night side of the shell. However, perhaps the shell could naturally rotate with the wind. Perhaps sails could bias it to rotate in a certain direction at a certain speed. So, then with 1/2 bar, perhaps a night would not get below freezing? But the days would be hot at the equator. So, I suggest an expanded metal grid as the top deck. Plants and humans could be below that. The expanded metal deck might reflect some light back into space. Of course windmills might render power, and the reaction of the wind to windmills might be your sails. So, you would put drag on them if you wanted to make the wind push your shell in a certain direction, or let them freewheel, or just lock them down, if you did not want that wind drag.

Below the bottom deck would be clouds of water vapor and noxious gasses, including most CO2. You could still have a hot surface, although you might have to inject some energy for that. You could have your flying robots, the surface robots, and you could have water condensate from the bottom deck feed a hydroelectric process where water falls through pipes for miles and miles, generating hydroelectric power. The water then would finally be impounded on the surface in covered insulated reservoirs, the water then used to either generate electricity by steam power (Very hot steam), or the water could be used to fill your surface and flying robots.

As for the robots, Your inhabitants in Venus_L2, or Venus_Shells could have them as second bodies as in the movie avatar. Of course with the shells, the below would be dark, but they could have infrared eyes, and bat like sonar, and I suppose radar. And the surface of Venus supposedly glows a dull red.

So, this of course is only one option to think of. I am very interested in the processes that appear to be going on on the surface of Venus. I think they may be very valuable, and before dismissing the current nature of Venus, and entering on a more radical change of it, I feel options should be explored. Yours is one Tom.

Last edited by Void (2015-01-12 06:49:12)

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-12 09:28:22

Impaler wrote:

Yes you indeed to have a bit more energy at that point then you do at Venus but you seem to be implying it is nearly equal to an Earth-orbital energy and that it is virtually free or super cheap to go between Sun-Venus L2 and Earth (or maybe Sun-Earth L1 which would be closer). I will need to see some numbers to be convinced of that, Venus is normally 108 million km from the Sun so an additional million is hardly any difference at all, I can't see this being remotely the effect your attributing to it. I think your misapplying the Earth-Moon Lagrange dynamics in which the bodies are much closer in mass and the Lagrange points are considerably further from the moon. In the Lagrange points between planets and the sun are so close to the planets they can effectively be considered to be ON the orbit of the planet.
And I still do not see the point of going to and stopping at this point on the way to and from Venus, just because I have access to stopping point part way through my trip to/from Venus I'm not saving any total DeltaV because I'd still need to go down into and out of Venus gravity well. And because it co-rotates with Venus it's got the same synod cycle with respect to Earth. Are you imagining this as some kind of position for a free floating colony?

You can lose some orbital energy as you fall towards the Sun by grazing Venus' outer atmosphere, this slows you down into an elliptical orbit around Venus, do it just right and the high point of that orbit will stretch all the way to L2, fire your rocket some when you get there and you can park your ship in L2. The advantage of L2 is you can control robots on the ground with a 6 second round trip time delay, which is much better than the time delay from Earth. On the down side is the fact that you only get direct line of sight on the night side of Venus, you coud establish comm sats in a lower orbit to help relay commands to probes on the day side without much more time delay. I think you will want probes landing in daylight so you can see what's there. Probes won't have much time once on the ground, so you need to make maximal use of the time you have to get useful science done. Perhaps a ship in Low Venus orbit might make more sense for the first missions. An atmosphere graze can slow you down to low Venus orbit as well. I think in that case, the interplanetary transfer vehicle could be kept at L2, and that way you slow down a crew capsule only into Low Venus orbit with just enough supplies to survive the stay in the vicinity of Venus for the time of the mission until the astronauts are ready to go home again, that way you don't have to slow down the whole interplanetary transfer vehicle and them boost it back out on transfer orbit to Earth once again. I think the manned mission will last until all surface and atmospheric probes are used up, then there is no reason for the astronauts to remain after that. So most likely a manned Venus mission will be a sprint mission. the astronauts will spend most of their time going between the planets than in Venus orbit. Later on when we have more powerful vehicles, we could send humans into the Venusian atmosphere, it might be a proof of principle to prove that humans can actually live there. I think the first manned missions will likely stay in orbit and control things on the ground from there.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-12 09:39:39

Void wrote:

Impaler, Hi.
I am interested in the Venus_L2 that Tom seems to indicate may exist. Although Tom likes the orbital/energy situation, primarily I was attracted to two potential factors. 1) Venus_L2 is reportedly partially shaded by Venus, to have a luminosity similar to Earths? 2) Venus has a tail, I want to harvest ions from it and since the solar wind may push those ions from Venus to Venus_L2. That is a hope. I know this kind of thinking drives you crazy, because you are so tuned to precision, but a broader view with some fuzzy thinking can get you to an approximate hope. Then you can analyze the situation and see how real it could be. If it were true that Venus_L2 has a similar solar flux to that of Earth orbit, then I might hope that machines designed to work in Earth orbit but placed in Venus_L2 will be more likely to preform as expected, with fewer unexpected mechanical failures than if you were putting them in a X2 luminosity. I do understand that unlike low Earth orbit, Venus_L2 is not very radiation protected.

Venus L2 is a surprisingly cold place if you are in the dead center of it, even with Venus directly between your space ship and the Sun, the Sun's disk is still larger than the disk of Venus, so some light will get around the edges, but you will receive less light per unit area than Mars gets, though more than received by Jupiter's cloud tops, probably the radiation environment is similar to that in the middle of the asteroid belt. Move away from the L2 center and you will get more and more sunlight as more of the Solar disk is exposed from blockage by Venus, at a certain distance from the L2 center, you will receive the same amount of Sunlight as the Earth per unit area. L2 is a great place to store fuel tanks. Venus will block a portion of a solar flare as well, though there is no protection against cosmic rays at L2, if your concerned about those, a stay in the Venusian atmosphere can block those, even at the 1 bar level, the Venusian atmosphere is denser than Earth's, that should block cosmic rays quite nicely, and solar flares too, which would produce nice light shows in the Venusian sky above the cloud tops.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-12 09:47:58

Void wrote:

Tom, I guess I see that as a pretty good answer.
However, I do see that you have not yet decided to investigate what Venus could do for the human race more immediately.
But I will also confess the robot surface and flying robot thing is pretty tentative. I do not have enough information on wind energy, and materials which could be used, but of course you have to think of something in a broad way before you get down to the details, and find out yes or no it could work.
But if it did work it would not preclude that ultimately the humans in control could choose to fully terraform Venus to resemble the Earth. However that would be a lot of work with very time delayed payback, and Venus is not really understood well enough to be certain that it could be done, even with 100,000 to 1,000,000 years to do it.

1,000 years is probably sufficient with the right technology and resources to do the job. It is definitely not going to take 1,000,000 years, I really don't think we would undertake any sort of terraforming effort until we develop the technology to get it done within 1,000 years, the thing is, we are probably not going to be around for 1,000,000 years and a sustained project lasting that long is not realistic. I think the timescale for terraforming Venus is going to be similar to the Interstellar travel times of a starship we could build today, that would be a nonrelativistic one traveling less than 1 tenth of the speed of light, probably close to 1% of the speed of light. At 1% of the speed of light it would take 440 years to reach Alpha Centauri, and there would be no guarantee that their are any planets orbiting that star that we can live on without terraforming. I think the goal should be if we can terraform Venus in 500 years, we should do it, it not, then we wait until we can.

Void wrote:

Personally, if I could manage to have confidence in a surface and flying robot community, and bean stalks or some variant that gives similar results, then ultimately I would consider a shell world, where in one option, 1/2 bar of Nitrogen and Oxygen was above the shell, and everything else below. Since U.V. would be blocked from interacting with the Sulfur compounds, Acid Rain would be much reduced. Granted Venus has quite a wind problem and I bet the loads would be horrific. But it is something to think about. Other problems might be snow building up on the night side of the shell. However, perhaps the shell could naturally rotate with the wind. Perhaps sails could bias it to rotate in a certain direction at a certain speed. So, then with 1/2 bar, perhaps a night would not get below freezing? But the days would be hot at the equator. So, I suggest an expanded metal grid as the top deck. Plants and humans could be below that. The expanded metal deck might reflect some light back into space. Of course windmills might render power, and the reaction of the wind to windmills might be your sails. So, you would put drag on them if you wanted to make the wind push your shell in a certain direction, or let them freewheel, or just lock them down, if you did not want that wind drag.
Below the bottom deck would be clouds of water vapor and noxious gasses, including most CO2. You could still have a hot surface, although you might have to inject some energy for that. You could have your flying robots, the surface robots, and you could have water condensate from the bottom deck feed a hydroelectric process where water falls through pipes for miles and miles, generating hydroelectric power. The water then would finally be impounded on the surface in covered insulated reservoirs, the water then used to either generate electricity by steam power (Very hot steam), or the water could be used to fill your surface and flying robots.
As for the robots, Your inhabitants in Venus_L2, or Venus_Shells could have them as second bodies as in the movie avatar. Of course with the shells, the below would be dark, but they could have infrared eyes, and bat like sonar, and I suppose radar. And the surface of Venus supposedly glows a dull red.
So, this of course is only one option to think of. I am very interested in the processes that appear to be going on on the surface of Venus. I think they may be very valuable, and before dismissing the current nature of Venus, and entering on a more radical change of it, I feel options should be explored. Yours is one Tom.

Impaler · 2015-01-12 15:04:50

Yes Void, your way out into soft-science fiction at this point and I find that very annoying as I consider this to be an Engineering forum not a fiction forum, if your not willing to do the leg work to make even the most basic back of a napkin check as to the viability of an idea I am not going to bother talking about it or do the checks for you.

Tom: I see some of the general scenario now that your laying out, having interplanetary staging vehicle stop at SVL2 and having something smaller go down to LVO to conduct the science portion of the mission. This would save the DeltaV to re-boost the interplanetary vehicle up from VLO back to Venus escape velocity which is a significant amount of DeltaV, it also means the interplanetary vehicle dose not need to do any kind of aerobraking and could be a low-thrust vehicle specialized for deep space and presumably heavily shielded from radiation.

More demands are placed on the smaller mission vehicle though, it must make a longer transit down from the L2 into an airocapture/airobrake maneuver. Then it must climb out of the Venus gravity well and return to SVL2 all by itself, this is MOST of the DeltaV of a transfer back to Earth. If this vehicle houses the crew then it would be large as well , conceivably as large as the interplanetary vehicle and the fact that it both houses the crew and has this much DeltaV capability means that the rendezvous is hardly necessary, direct return would be feasible.

In on the other hand multiple trips between SVL2 and LVO were being made, or the decent craft to LVO (and presumably into Venus atmosphere and surface) were unmanned probes being controlled by crew at SVL2 then it is a very attractive mission architecture. It would be much like an Asteroid visitation in which the DeltaV at the destination is very low, the mission duration would be about 2 years so it would be good practice before Mars missions which are minimum of 3 years.

I would really like to see what the numbers are for transfers between SEL1 and SVL2, and correspondingly between SEL2 and SML1. I suspect the DeltaV costs are close to the Heliocentric portions of low-thrust missions after a spiral out of the planetary gravity well. That can be half the deltaV in a typical slow trajectory so their is good potential that transfering between Lagrange points IF the transfer vehicles are really really massive and reused and it's practical to get propellent too them.

Void · 2015-01-12 15:14:41

I think I will think. I think I can think of a bad habit I could do without.

Last edited by Void (2015-01-12 15:24:47)

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-01-12 17:49:22

Impaler wrote:

Yes Void, your way out into soft-science fiction at this point and I find that very annoying as I consider this to be an Engineering forum not a fiction forum, if your not willing to do the leg work to make even the most basic back of a napkin check as to the viability of an idea I am not going to bother talking about it or do the checks for you.
Tom: I see some of the general scenario now that your laying out, having interplanetary staging vehicle stop at SVL2 and having something smaller go down to LVO to conduct the science portion of the mission. This would save the DeltaV to re-boost the interplanetary vehicle up from VLO back to Venus escape velocity which is a significant amount of DeltaV, it also means the interplanetary vehicle dose not need to do any kind of aerobraking and could be a low-thrust vehicle specialized for deep space and presumably heavily shielded from radiation.
More demands are placed on the smaller mission vehicle though, it must make a longer transit down from the L2 into an airocapture/airobrake maneuver. Then it must climb out of the Venus gravity well and return to SVL2 all by itself, this is MOST of the DeltaV of a transfer back to Earth. If this vehicle houses the crew then it would be large as well , conceivably as large as the interplanetary vehicle and the fact that it both houses the crew and has this much DeltaV capability means that the rendezvous is hardly necessary, direct return would be feasible.
In on the other hand multiple trips between SVL2 and LVO were being made, or the decent craft to LVO (and presumably into Venus atmosphere and surface) were unmanned probes being controlled by crew at SVL2 then it is a very attractive mission architecture. It would be much like an Asteroid visitation in which the DeltaV at the destination is very low, the mission duration would be about 2 years so it would be good practice before Mars missions which are minimum of 3 years.
I would really like to see what the numbers are for transfers between SEL1 and SVL2, and correspondingly between SEL2 and SML1. I suspect the DeltaV costs are close to the Heliocentric portions of low-thrust missions after a spiral out of the planetary gravity well. That can be half the deltaV in a typical slow trajectory so their is good potential that transfering between Lagrange points IF the transfer vehicles are really really massive and reused and it's practical to get propellent too them.

My feeling is that the vehicle at L2 would be an Earth return vehicle, the astronauts need not arrive in it. Basically the astronauts arrive in one vehicle and depart in another, that way neither vehicle need carry supplies for the entire trip. For example the Astronauts arrive in one interplanetary vehicle which aerobrakes in the Venusian atmosphere and enters low Venus Orbit, when the astronauts depart, the depart in a small capsule, not the whole vehicle which arrived I Venus orbit, that Vehicle they arrived in took them from low Earth orbit to low Venus orbit. Another vehicle was sent to VL2 before hand with a full load of food and supplies, it arrives unmanned and is kept at L2 with low thrust ion engines as it waits for the crewed vehicle to arrive in the Venus system, astronauts then transfer to the L2 vehicle to return to Earth.

Impaler · 2015-01-12 22:18:25

That's not going to be worth while, if the trip from LVO is chemical then the propellent for that and the whole capsule would likely mass more then the propellent to just have that Ion drive system at SVL2 just come down and pick up and push the whole crew vehicle out again. Splitting up the 'supplies' is not very advantageous, it's ~6 months of food which is like 1-2 ton total. Most of the mass in in the equipment that is part of the a habitat that can keep the air/water pure, your return vessel would be duplicating all of that when you already have a functional copy that came with the crew and already had the capability of lasting 1.5 years so another half a year in that habitat can't be that much more, I wouldn't abandon a habitat that's survived that long for a tiny cramped capsule with very limited endurance to make a life-or-death rendezvous with another habitat that's untested, and that capsule trip is going to take a while SVL2 is probably what a week away for Venus?

Void · 2015-01-13 09:19:37

This is what I am interested in for Venus_L2
About the Venus_Tail:
http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/50247- … gnetotail/
http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/50246- … s-express/
Lagrange Point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

I am interested in finding a way to mine the upper atmosphere of Venus from Venus_L2 if possible.

A suppose a more humble interest would be that a probe would study the magnetic activity at Venus_L2. It would be interesting to see if there could ever be a way to capture a magnetic loop using reconnection.

And having studied that, it might be supposed that a similar Mars_L2 exists. Lower temperatures there. If you could capture ions, and somehow convert them to gas, and then bottle it at the Mars_L2, maybe that could be of value. If you could lock onto a ejected magnetic loop with a spacecraft, perhaps you could somehow use that as a propulsion method outward in the solar system.

Last edited by Void (2015-01-13 09:23:54)

Quaoar · 2015-01-13 16:47:59

Void wrote:

This is what I am interested in for Venus_L2
About the Venus_Tail:
http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/50247- … gnetotail/
http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/50246- … s-express/
Lagrange Point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … s2.svg.png
I am interested in finding a way to mine the upper atmosphere of Venus from Venus_L2 if possible.
A suppose a more humble interest would be that a probe would study the magnetic activity at Venus_L2. It would be interesting to see if there could ever be a way to capture a magnetic loop using reconnection.
And having studied that, it might be supposed that a similar Mars_L2 exists. Lower temperatures there. If you could capture ions, and somehow convert them to gas, and then bottle it at the Mars_L2, maybe that could be of value. If you could lock onto a ejected magnetic loop with a spacecraft, perhaps you could somehow use that as a propulsion method outward in the solar system.

What you say is called "propulsive fluid accumulation": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propulsive … ccumulator
there are many interesting study on the topic.
The only difference is that on Venus you will also need a system to crack CO2 in CO and Oxygen.

Last edited by Quaoar (2015-01-13 16:50:01)

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