> it seems like they should be able spare a probe for Venus. Venus is hard unless you want to just stay in orbit. Surface temperature that's steady right aroun

> it seems like they should be able spare a probe for Venus. Venus is hard unless you want to just stay in orbit. Surface temperature that's steady right around 872F (tin melts at 449.4F, lead at 621F, zinc at 787F) and a surface pressure that is equivalent to being under 3000 feet of water. Sure, something in orbit over Venus could do some mapping and stuff but meh, Mars could have harbored life like we find on Earth now at some point in its past, we can hang out for months or years taking photos from orbit and the ground, on the ground missions can last months or years instead of hours (Venera 12 sent data back for 110 minutes, it could have for longer but was out of range of its orbiter after 110 mimutes) or days that evne modern equipment would be able to survive before you started having multiple failures. Best case you'd have to land something akin to a submarine with expendable coolant and buy some time as you consumed coolant but realistically you aren't going to get more than a couple of days if that on the surface. Something like a balloon is just as likely to fail as it is to succeed given we have no way to realistically test one before sending it and even then, it's still going to collect very limited amount of data, not much more than the Russians already collected via the various Venera missions.