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> VERITAS Venus Mission is going to have to be delayed from 2028 to 2031 due to issues caused by JPL's failure to launch Psyche That's extremely disappointing.
by dmix 4y ago
> VERITAS Venus Mission is going to have to be delayed from 2028 to 2031 due to issues caused by JPL's failure to launch Psyche
That's extremely disappointing. Venus is easily the 2nd most interesting planet "close" to us besides Mars. I was really looking forward to that one.
> From the standpoint of total mass delivered to Venus, the best launch opportunities occur in 2029 and 2031.
It's too bad Russia's ambitious space programs are mosty vaporware. They pinoeered Venus exploration and have their own (pretend) Venus program that AFAIK isn't going anywhere.
> a proposed Russian space mission to Venus that would include an orbiter and a lander to be launched in 2029.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera-D?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera-D?wprov=sfti1
- pencilguin 4y agoVenus is more interesting to me than Mars. We already know more about Mars than I cared to know. Venus is still packed with mystery. Hot mystery, yes.
- dmix 4y agoIt's also really interesting purely from a physics or human adventure perspective. The way it crushes anything that goes near the surface. Mars seems like an introductory class to Venus' horror story. But yes there's plenty to learn, especially from a statistical analysis for finding life in interstellar space type of thing.
- pencilguin 4y agoAt cloud-top level, temperature, pressure, and gravity are all close to Earth-normal, and breathing-air is buoyant. Numerous materials can be extracted from the outside air, including oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and even some metals. A day/night cycle is about 100 hours, depending on how close you are to a pole. A nuclear reactor is as simple as a big fabric tube suspended vertically with a naked atomic pile hanging near the bottom, and a wind turbine turning in an opening at the top, the only moving part. You need something non-solar because nights are long. Alternatively, you can store energy with a weight on a cable attached to a generator. Play it out to discharge, winch it back up to charge. Or maybe different layers of atmosphere circulate at different rates. If so, you can hang a wind turbine in the next layer below.
- FuriouslyAdrift 4y agoThis is one of the plots in the Space Merchants... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
- dmix 4y agoThat book any good?
- code_biologist 4y agoA 3.85 avg rating with 9,862 ratings on Goodreads, so: average, but ever so slightly tilted towards good?
- FuriouslyAdrift 4y agoIt's older but considered one of the great classics of sci-fi.
- aptsurdist 4y agoI love the mention of gravity storage here. The potential of gravity storage is very real, but you need a lot of weight and a lot of height to achieve meaningful amounts of electricity. And at large scales of weight and height it becomes a surprisingly hard problem. For example, a steel cable can’t stretch much further than a mile under earth gravity before it succumbs to its own weight. But there are other solutions. It’s not rocket science, as they say.
- pencilguin 4y agoA steel cable one square inch in cross section and a mile long weighs <19k lb on Earth, a bit less on Venus. Cheap mild steel has tensile strength 50k lb/in², and can be as much as 10x as strong. So, self-supporting steel 3 miles to 30 miles. Getting 250 tons of high-strength steel cable (sheathed against corrosion) to Venus is left as an exercise for the reader. Likewise, a big enough balloon to hold that up. And a strong enough winch. But in practice, you would make the cable of carbon extracted from atmospheric CO2, instead, and it could support itself all the way down to the surface, 50 mi below. You would need to protect the end against acid vapor corrosion at 470 C: another exercise for the reader.
- ramraj07 4y agoI highly recommend anyone with any interest in space follow https://youtube.com/c/MarsGuy https://youtube.com/c/MarsGuy / he gives a weekly update on what the rovers find in great detail and it’s fascinating. At the same time I continuously question if the findings they make wit these rovers continue to justify the multi billion dollar expense we make on these missions. I’d much rather we spend our limited resources on Venus and Europa, and actually starting to send interstellar probes than continuing to double down on Mars. It’s become a vanity project for billionaires anyway so let them figure out putting a man there. NASA can start focusing on the next step in exploration of space.
- dmix 4y ago> It’s become a vanity project for billionaires anyway so let them figure out putting a man there. That is one prominent billionaire's idea for stuff to do in the next decade yes... But he wasn't a major factor considered by NASA when the current projects were funded. Otherwise I'd probably agree Mars might have gotten too much federal funding vs other projects in the last decade.
- pencilguin 4y agoI, for one, am eager to see any random billionaire go to Mars, provided they stay. I would bet any amount of money none will.
- wallfacer120 4y agoThere's no mystery to Mars, just letting its crust hang out there for all to see.
- Pigalowda 4y agoI agree. It’s quite scandalous.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoThe moon is more interesting than either. Focus on asteroid belts. Big gravity wells suck.
- newZWhoDis 4y agoIt’s not sexy but it’s true. Asteroid mining will completely change life on earth. Imagine the technical implications of copper, gold, platinum, etc becoming as cheap and abundant as tin foil.
- Moissanite 4y agoI imagine the most efficient option will be to either crash the asteroids into the Earth directly (assuming they aren't too big), or "land" them on the moon for exploitation there. Sending a whole mining/refining rig to each asteroid feels a bit too high risk.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoDisagree. You can just electromagnetic mass drive the finished good back to earth orbit for collection.
- pencilguin 4y agoRight. The bottom of a gravity well is a nuisance for anything other than human survival.
- Moissanite 4y agoYou can't "just" do anything. Landing a significant payload on an asteroid is barely do-able right now. We are a long way from building mining rigs and railguns up there; clamping on an engine and some extra propellant is much more viable in the near term - generously estimated at within the next 30 years.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
- lordgrenville 4y agoIt's kind of funny to hear someone disappointed about a delay from 2028 to 2031. To my brain those both just fall into the same "long time away" bin.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]