NASA's Incredible, Futuristic, And Totally Real Plan To Establish A Human Colony

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NASA's Incredible, Futuristic, And Totally Real Plan To Establish A Human Colony On Venus



NASA has plans to live on Venus. Seriously.
In fact, up in the clouds above its scorching surface, Venus is "probably the most Earth-like environment that's out there," Chris Jones of NASA told Evan Ackerman at IEEE Spectrum.

Forget Mars and its frigid temperatures and thin atmosphere when we can live like gods, afloat in the clouds of Venus.

Jones is part of the Space Mission Analysis Branch of NASA's Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley Research Center in Virginia. The research group recently unveiled a detailed plan to eventually set up permanent residence on Venus. The mission is called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or HAVOC. (We reached out to NASA for comment but have not heard back.)

Right now, HAVOC is just an idea, but if fully implemented, it would lead to floating cities on Venus that look like this:





Venus' cloudy skies are relatively pleasant — especially when compared to the planet's surface, perhaps one of the most inhospitable places you could imagine. Temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, there are more active volcanoes than on any other planet in our solar system, and atmospheric pressures are 90 times denser than Earth's at sea level.

The few landers humankind has set down on the surface of Venus did not last very long before melting and crumbling under the extreme environment. Here's an image of the surface taken by the Soviets' Vanera 13 lander in 1981. It survived 127 minutes.

venus
USSR / Preserved by the NASA National Space Science Data Center

If humankind were ever to live on Venus, it would almost certainly have to be in the clouds, high above the surface.

At about 30 miles up, the temperature is roughly 160 degrees Fahrenheit, a fraction of the surface temperature, and the atmospheric pressure is comparable to Earth's at sea level — an ideal place to set up a city of helium-filled, solar-powered airships. And Jones and his colleagues have worked out a five-phase plan to make it happen:

HAVOC would begin by dispatching a robot into the Venutial atmosphere to study the environment and make sure there are no surprises.
After that, NASA would send a manned mission to orbit the planet for one month.
If all went well, the crew would then enter the planet's atmosphere and float among the clouds for another month.
Later missions would send a crew to stay in the planet's atmosphere for a year. And if that was successful, then...
We could begin to establish permanent floating cities on Venus.
Pretty cool!

Of course the plan is far simpler than the execution. But the HAVOC team have the details mapped out down to the minute. The key to the mission is successfully deploying the floating airship. To do this, the team would first encase the airship inside a protective shell that would enter the atmosphere at 16,000 miles per hour.


http://uk.businessinsider.com/colony-on-venus-2014-12