Ackerman, Evan. “NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, 15 Sept. 2020, 19:30 GMT, spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration.
Article title:
NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration
Image: NASA Langley Research Center
My summary of the article:
NASA's HAVOC, High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, aims to colonize Venus not on its surface where the environment is "hellish" but on its high altitudes where temperature is 75 degrees celsius (merely 17 degrees higher than the hottest place on Earth), pressure is one atmosphere (almost the same as Earth), and gravitational field strength is just slighter than on the surface of Earth. Researchers claim that such high altitudes of Venus are more hospitable than the surfaces of Mars in terms of temperature, gravity, and pressure.
To achieve its goal of building levitating aircrafts for human settlement, HAVOC is currently working on solving key problems regarding high altitude Venus settlement such as supplying energy to aircrafts by solar panels, traveling to Venus and back, mid-Venus-atmosphere deceleration, circumnavigation in Venus's atmosphere, protection of solar cells from atmospheric sulfuric acid droplets, and more.
The root of many of the reasons NASA is planning to go to Venus is quite simple: the desire to learn and explore. Also, with the exception of Venus Express (European Space Agency), Venus has been largely ignored since the 1980s despite it having high potentials for scientific discoveries. HAVOC aims to bring the spirit of Venus exploration back and play a role in the post-Earth future of humanity.
My response to the article:
The idea of settling not on the surface but on mid-atmosphere of Venus comes to me as very original and inspiring yet quite intimidating. Since, as mentioned on the article, the rocket launched from Earth to Venus cannot reach the surface of Venus due to the overwhelming heat, HAVOC must propose a way to firstly stop the projectile mid-Venus-atmosphere and secondly adjust the net-thrust to the perpendicular direction of gravity to enable it to rotate around Venus in a circular path while keeping the altitude constant. The idea of this sounds fascinating and somewhat impossible, but I am sure that there are engineers and scientists in NASA who will make this a reality.
That being said, if HAVOC does succeed in sending permanent settlement aircrafts on the atmosphere of Venus, it would be a great achievement in two ways: firstly, providing a secondary "home" for humanity, and secondly, developing and advancing aerospace technology to the next level while working to achieve that goal. Who knows? It may be the case that far-future generation of humans live in mid-atmospheric aircrafts of Venus.
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