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How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people ne

How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) Literally how flying planes off Aircraft Carriers works.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    Speaking as a former naval aviator, we haven't cracked the whole "cats and traps with an SSTO" bit yet.
- boolit 1y ago
  > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble No more than for a floating platform on the ocean. (Or frankly any sea or airborne firing platform.) If your launch mass is a significant fraction of station mass, and you can't counterweight, you could float it off to the side and then have the baloon detach when its engines fire. But none of this is in even the top thousand problems that come with colonising Venus.
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out. Assuming these cloud cities have landing strips, right? Managing ballast might be a challenge…
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out This requires engineering the rocket to withstand structural loads in two directions as well as a ~90-degree rotation under thrust. Not trivial. (It's been a major handicap for airlaunch on Earth.) Landing on and taking off from floating platforms is like the one part of Venusian colonisation we've actually solved.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Or you just drop it off the side.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      Floating on a liquid surface is markedly different from floating within a fluid (liquid or gaseous). To float on a liquid, one merely needs to maintain a lower average density within the vessel than the surrounding liquid. Assuming a largely hollow vessel (as with a ship or barge), it's possible to add or remove considerable payload without losing stable flotation characteristics as the draft of the vessel automatically compensates for the variation, displacing more or less liquid, and maintaining equilibrium. To float in a fluid, one must maintain precise neutral buoyancy, which is an entirely different animal. As pressure varies with depth or altitude, the tendency is for a vessel to contract as it sinks and expand as it rises, leading to a runaway buoyancy shift (increasingly negative with depth, increasingly positive with height). Many military submarines operate at comparatively shallow depths, often only slightly more than their overall length* (for larger submarines), given both the immense pressures of even modest ocean depths (a few hundred metres), and the compounding nature and risks of runaway buoyancy loss. Plans for cargo airships face corresponding problems in that when offloading cargo or passengers it is necessary to vent or otherwise scavenge lifting gas (the expense and/or challenges of either venting or compressing helium are great), or to onboard a corresponding mass of ballast. Where suitable water is plentiful the latter is fairly viable, but there are many applications proposed for cargo airships which suggest transport of heavy cargos sites with limited capabilities for same (no facilities, deserts, salt- or otherwise-contaminated water which might play poorly with buoyancy-compensation systems aboard the airship). Rocket launch from an inhabited floating atmospheric platform would require accumulation of large stores of fuel (the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation also works against you), as well as presenting various risks associated with enormous barely-contained explosions (should you be lucky). The risks are immense, and hand-waving them away is disingenuous to the extreme.
- eloisant 1y ago
  I'm sure we can figure out stuff, but I guess my point is, why would we do that at all? How fucked up Earth needs to be than living on a floating oil platform above Venus is better? The point is already hard to make for the Moon or Mars.
  - o1bf2k25n8g5 1y ago
    > why would we do that at all? This question is one of a whole genre of "why" questions that come from supposed pragmatists, but I can't help but think the existence of the question misses the entire point. Luckily, one of the older questions of this genre was about why anyone would bother to climb Mount Everest, and ol' Mallory had such a good answer that I'll just paste the whole thing here: > People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. > If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. Of course, with Venus, there's the joy of exploration and also tons of profits and learning to be had. For example, we could cover the entire planet in giant ads. Think of the CPMs you'd get as people looked out the window on their way to Mercury!
    - bregma 1y ago
      We choose to go to the Moon ... and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  >By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I believe they are having trouble envisioning how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rockets thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from. I also find the idea difficult to understand, but assume that is because it is in an area I know nothing about and the problems that I think sound bad are actually totally solvable engineering problems otherwise it would not be have been suggested as a solution by engineers expert in that area. on edit: changed rocks to rockets
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rocks thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles. Will a launching rocket impart force to the platform? Yes. But unless the platform is super weirdly balanced, or the rocket absurdly oversized for the platform, it will stabilise after rocking a bit. (You'd have to design the platform to be stable in winds, anyway.) And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage. The ww2 german "v2 in a tube towed by a U-boat so it can get closer to its target" project being a decent conceptual example of this.
    - glenstein 1y ago
      >It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles. It's a great comparison that helps me understand it a bit. In many respects, Venus's atmosphere is as heavy as an ocean. That said, I can still see how if you're talking about the upper atmosphere with pressure similar to what you would have on Earth, the force necessary to do a straight vertical takeoff imparted against a platform seems like it could cause problems. But it might just be the Archimedes thing of "give me a prop large enough and deliver long enough and I can move the world" applied to atmospheric dynamics, e.g. enough buoyancy and you're good to go. I just don't know how much is "enough" when you're talking about Venus and if that runs into prohibitive engineering complexity that makes it different from our familiar Earth examples. Not saying it can't be done but I think that one question at least, was reasonable.
- pmontra 1y ago
  You probably launch and land on a floating platform nearby. Nobody on Earth launches from a city. They launch and land in remote areas. Safety and noise. Lot of noise. Then you fly to the colony balloon.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Literally how floating works. Yes, ignoring momentum. Do parachutes just get stuck in the air halfway down? When do you inflate it? If you inflate it, can you even deorbit? Do those pop when you deorbit? Do you cover the balloon with big heavy heat shield tiles? I'm not claiming I understand this at all, but you seem to have some child's grasp of "how floating works". > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. Launching from the solid ground shakes it (the ground) like a leaf. But you're going to launch a rocket from the balloon, and you can't quite see where there might be a problem. >Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? If I can't get the materials to repair my building in a hurry, I go outside and I wait. Or I stay inside and I wait. And if I can't do that for my Venusian balloon city, I slowly sink into a zone that melts lead and bakes me alive. And if I get the materials after it has stared sinking, repairing it won't reinflate the balloon and have it rise again, because some significant fraction of the air has leaked out.
  - emilecantin 1y ago
    > If I can't get the materials to repair my building in a hurry, I go outside and I wait. Or I stay inside and I wait. And if I can't do that for my Venusian balloon city, I slowly sink into a zone that melts lead and bakes me alive. And if I get the materials after it has stared sinking, repairing it won't reinflate the balloon and have it rise again, because some significant fraction of the air has leaked out. It's more similar to a boat than a house. If your boat has a leak, you need to repair it very quickly or it ends up at the bottom of the ocean. Yet we've managed to do it relatively reliably.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >Yet we've managed to do it relatively reliably. Sure. Do that when you're in the middle of an ocean that's a few trillion miles wide. It's not as if you can just dive down to the bottom of the ocean there, mine some bauxite, take it back up to your sinking ship, refine it, manufacture new repair materials for the boat, then repair it, is it? No, you have to have it shipped from a coast a trillion miles away. So again, where are they manufactured, and how long do they take to get there? Can any of this shit even be made in the vicinity of Venus, where transit times might be non-absurd? There are no recoverable materials on the planet itself, are there?
- dylan604 1y ago
  > Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton. The question you answered reads like someone that has missed all of the spectacular fails with Starship tests. Which is the ship designed for these types of adventures, so it seems like a big miss by the GP
M95D 1y ago
> How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Aerobraking with the balloon? A balloon the size of a city would slow down very fast in a thick atmosphere like that, then slowly descend until it reaches the stable altitude. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? Spaceplane? Take off like a glider on a slope runway, then ignite the rocket. > If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? That's a true problem. Local manufacturing would be on the surface. An elevator or cable car could make the connection to the ground facilities, if the winds aren't too strong. But the manufacturing of the materials would be extremely difficult in surface conditions. > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Nope. See first answer. > Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely. Possibly. But the biggest question is why go there?
- Zardoz84 1y ago
  Facilities on the surface of Venus ? What drug did you take? First. High temperatures in a corrosive atmosphere. Also, there aren't winds. There are currents. At the surface the atmosphere it's supercritical. It's more like a fluid than a gas.
Symmetry 1y ago
Gonathan Goff wrote bunch on what you have to work with in terms of what you can extract from Venus's atmosphere. While metals would need to be imported if you're going to pick some place in outer space to live its hard to do much better. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/
- glenstein 1y ago
  One fascinating idea I haven't heard talked about is, if we ever are able to make super-strong carbon composites, they could be used on Venus for passive floating dragnets to scrape raw materials from the surface. They could float just enough to drag the surface from one end and be carried along by winds from the other, and then be passively triggered to float back to the upper atmosphere to be harvested. Thanks to the extreme bouyancy of Venus, a small amount of compressed air could passively lift much more than it would on Earth, making Venus's bouyancy a secret super power. And you could design nets with creative combinations of hooks, one-way valves and so on to gather a payload as it passively drags the surface. And seaweed-style distribution of compressed air capsules could make it fault-tolerant even if ripped into segments by the horrific winds of the middle atmosphere. The temperature, torsion, and corrosion are as extreme as it gets, and it may not be realistic, and/or it may not be feasible to think such payloads could float through the hurricane force winds and be recoverable in any systematic way at higher altitudes. But it has a tantalizing feeling of "holy heck this bouyancy super power might be useful" in the event we had material strong enough to do it. That would give a hypothetical Venus settlement access to iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, some titanium, and bunches of silicon dioxide.
- hwc 1y ago
  Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) Literally how flying planes off Aircraft Carriers works.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  Speaking as a former naval aviator, we haven't cracked the whole "cats and traps with an SSTO" bit yet.
boolit 1y ago
> By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble No more than for a floating platform on the ocean. (Or frankly any sea or airborne firing platform.) If your launch mass is a significant fraction of station mass, and you can't counterweight, you could float it off to the side and then have the baloon detach when its engines fire. But none of this is in even the top thousand problems that come with colonising Venus.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out. Assuming these cloud cities have landing strips, right? Managing ballast might be a challenge…
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out This requires engineering the rocket to withstand structural loads in two directions as well as a ~90-degree rotation under thrust. Not trivial. (It's been a major handicap for airlaunch on Earth.) Landing on and taking off from floating platforms is like the one part of Venusian colonisation we've actually solved.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      Or you just drop it off the side.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    Floating on a liquid surface is markedly different from floating within a fluid (liquid or gaseous). To float on a liquid, one merely needs to maintain a lower average density within the vessel than the surrounding liquid. Assuming a largely hollow vessel (as with a ship or barge), it's possible to add or remove considerable payload without losing stable flotation characteristics as the draft of the vessel automatically compensates for the variation, displacing more or less liquid, and maintaining equilibrium. To float in a fluid, one must maintain precise neutral buoyancy, which is an entirely different animal. As pressure varies with depth or altitude, the tendency is for a vessel to contract as it sinks and expand as it rises, leading to a runaway buoyancy shift (increasingly negative with depth, increasingly positive with height). Many military submarines operate at comparatively shallow depths, often only slightly more than their overall length* (for larger submarines), given both the immense pressures of even modest ocean depths (a few hundred metres), and the compounding nature and risks of runaway buoyancy loss. Plans for cargo airships face corresponding problems in that when offloading cargo or passengers it is necessary to vent or otherwise scavenge lifting gas (the expense and/or challenges of either venting or compressing helium are great), or to onboard a corresponding mass of ballast. Where suitable water is plentiful the latter is fairly viable, but there are many applications proposed for cargo airships which suggest transport of heavy cargos sites with limited capabilities for same (no facilities, deserts, salt- or otherwise-contaminated water which might play poorly with buoyancy-compensation systems aboard the airship). Rocket launch from an inhabited floating atmospheric platform would require accumulation of large stores of fuel (the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation also works against you), as well as presenting various risks associated with enormous barely-contained explosions (should you be lucky). The risks are immense, and hand-waving them away is disingenuous to the extreme.
eloisant 1y ago
I'm sure we can figure out stuff, but I guess my point is, why would we do that at all? How fucked up Earth needs to be than living on a floating oil platform above Venus is better? The point is already hard to make for the Moon or Mars.
- o1bf2k25n8g5 1y ago
  > why would we do that at all? This question is one of a whole genre of "why" questions that come from supposed pragmatists, but I can't help but think the existence of the question misses the entire point. Luckily, one of the older questions of this genre was about why anyone would bother to climb Mount Everest, and ol' Mallory had such a good answer that I'll just paste the whole thing here: > People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. > If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. Of course, with Venus, there's the joy of exploration and also tons of profits and learning to be had. For example, we could cover the entire planet in giant ads. Think of the CPMs you'd get as people looked out the window on their way to Mercury!
  - bregma 1y ago
    We choose to go to the Moon ... and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
>By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I believe they are having trouble envisioning how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rockets thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from. I also find the idea difficult to understand, but assume that is because it is in an area I know nothing about and the problems that I think sound bad are actually totally solvable engineering problems otherwise it would not be have been suggested as a solution by engineers expert in that area. on edit: changed rocks to rockets
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rocks thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles. Will a launching rocket impart force to the platform? Yes. But unless the platform is super weirdly balanced, or the rocket absurdly oversized for the platform, it will stabilise after rocking a bit. (You'd have to design the platform to be stable in winds, anyway.) And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >And if you do have an absurdly oversided rocket, you don't launch it from your platform. You float it off to the side on a dedicated launch "boat" and have it ditch its floaty as an ultra-early first stage. The ww2 german "v2 in a tube towed by a U-boat so it can get closer to its target" project being a decent conceptual example of this.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    >It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles. It's a great comparison that helps me understand it a bit. In many respects, Venus's atmosphere is as heavy as an ocean. That said, I can still see how if you're talking about the upper atmosphere with pressure similar to what you would have on Earth, the force necessary to do a straight vertical takeoff imparted against a platform seems like it could cause problems. But it might just be the Archimedes thing of "give me a prop large enough and deliver long enough and I can move the world" applied to atmospheric dynamics, e.g. enough buoyancy and you're good to go. I just don't know how much is "enough" when you're talking about Venus and if that runs into prohibitive engineering complexity that makes it different from our familiar Earth examples. Not saying it can't be done but I think that one question at least, was reasonable.
pmontra 1y ago
You probably launch and land on a floating platform nearby. Nobody on Earth launches from a city. They launch and land in remote areas. Safety and noise. Lot of noise. Then you fly to the colony balloon.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>Literally how floating works. Yes, ignoring momentum. Do parachutes just get stuck in the air halfway down? When do you inflate it? If you inflate it, can you even deorbit? Do those pop when you deorbit? Do you cover the balloon with big heavy heat shield tiles? I'm not claiming I understand this at all, but you seem to have some child's grasp of "how floating works". > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. Launching from the solid ground shakes it (the ground) like a leaf. But you're going to launch a rocket from the balloon, and you can't quite see where there might be a problem. >Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? If I can't get the materials to repair my building in a hurry, I go outside and I wait. Or I stay inside and I wait. And if I can't do that for my Venusian balloon city, I slowly sink into a zone that melts lead and bakes me alive. And if I get the materials after it has stared sinking, repairing it won't reinflate the balloon and have it rise again, because some significant fraction of the air has leaked out.
- emilecantin 1y ago
  > If I can't get the materials to repair my building in a hurry, I go outside and I wait. Or I stay inside and I wait. And if I can't do that for my Venusian balloon city, I slowly sink into a zone that melts lead and bakes me alive. And if I get the materials after it has stared sinking, repairing it won't reinflate the balloon and have it rise again, because some significant fraction of the air has leaked out. It's more similar to a boat than a house. If your boat has a leak, you need to repair it very quickly or it ends up at the bottom of the ocean. Yet we've managed to do it relatively reliably.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >Yet we've managed to do it relatively reliably. Sure. Do that when you're in the middle of an ocean that's a few trillion miles wide. It's not as if you can just dive down to the bottom of the ocean there, mine some bauxite, take it back up to your sinking ship, refine it, manufacture new repair materials for the boat, then repair it, is it? No, you have to have it shipped from a coast a trillion miles away. So again, where are they manufactured, and how long do they take to get there? Can any of this shit even be made in the vicinity of Venus, where transit times might be non-absurd? There are no recoverable materials on the planet itself, are there?
dylan604 1y ago
> Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton. The question you answered reads like someone that has missed all of the spectacular fails with Starship tests. Which is the ship designed for these types of adventures, so it seems like a big miss by the GP

M95D 1y ago

> How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Aerobraking with the balloon? A balloon the size of a city would slow down very fast in a thick atmosphere like that, then slowly descend until it reaches the stable altitude. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? Spaceplane? Take off like a glider on a slope runway, then ignite the rocket. > If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? That's a true problem. Local manufacturing would be on the surface. An elevator or cable car could make the connection to the ground facilities, if the winds aren't too strong. But the manufacturing of the materials would be extremely difficult in surface conditions. > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Nope. See first answer. > Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely. Possibly. But the biggest question is why go there?

Zardoz84 1y ago
Facilities on the surface of Venus ? What drug did you take? First. High temperatures in a corrosive atmosphere. Also, there aren't winds. There are currents. At the surface the atmosphere it's supercritical. It's more like a fluid than a gas.

Symmetry 1y ago

Gonathan Goff wrote bunch on what you have to work with in terms of what you can extract from Venus's atmosphere. While metals would need to be imported if you're going to pick some place in outer space to live its hard to do much better. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/

glenstein 1y ago
One fascinating idea I haven't heard talked about is, if we ever are able to make super-strong carbon composites, they could be used on Venus for passive floating dragnets to scrape raw materials from the surface. They could float just enough to drag the surface from one end and be carried along by winds from the other, and then be passively triggered to float back to the upper atmosphere to be harvested. Thanks to the extreme bouyancy of Venus, a small amount of compressed air could passively lift much more than it would on Earth, making Venus's bouyancy a secret super power. And you could design nets with creative combinations of hooks, one-way valves and so on to gather a payload as it passively drags the surface. And seaweed-style distribution of compressed air capsules could make it fault-tolerant even if ripped into segments by the horrific winds of the middle atmosphere. The temperature, torsion, and corrosion are as extreme as it gets, and it may not be realistic, and/or it may not be feasible to think such payloads could float through the hurricane force winds and be recoverable in any systematic way at higher altitudes. But it has a tantalizing feeling of "holy heck this bouyancy super power might be useful" in the event we had material strong enough to do it. That would give a hypothetical Venus settlement access to iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, some titanium, and bunches of silicon dioxide.
hwc 1y ago
Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.