Back in the 60s NASA considered a plan for a manned flyby of Venus using Apollo-derived hardware.
I've wondered if a modern day manned flyby mission might make sense. A rover could be landed on Venus more easily than on Mars, but it would, by necessity, have a very short lifetime on the surface. Once it's out of coolant, the mission is over. So if you were going to land a rover (or rovers) on the surface of Venus, you'd need to maximize their effectiveness. One way to do this would be to teleoperate them in near real-time, which could be done if rover landing were coordinated with a manned flyby.
A manned flyby of Venus would be substantially cheaper and less risky than a manned mission to Mars. There's no manned landing component, and the flyby mission itself would take a little over a year, which is pushing the limit for human exposure to micogravity, but within the range that we have actual experience.
This kind of mission will, of course, only make sense if you are an advocate of manned space exploration in the first place.
There is still a problem we haven't solved - solar radiation. The ISS astronauts may have been up there for long periods of time, but they are protected by the earth's magnetic field. A trip to another planet doesn't have this solution. Even for the Apollo missions, we got lucky that no bad solar activity occurred, and that mission lasted eight days.
That has to be the coolest idea I have heard in a very very long time.
Absolutely no convincing long term value, but we just have to do it, just because we can. No asteroids to mine, no Mars bases to build, but "what happens if we go over there and look"
I wouldn't go so far as to say no long term value -- a fly-by would be good preparation for an asteroid mission or a Mars/Phobos orbital mission. In fact it might be possible to do the follow-on mission with the same ship.
NASA clearly needs an intermediate step between LEO and putting a man on Mars. Venus flyby plus teleoperated rovers is the easiest mission I can think of that might also be useful.
I meant not to imply it would be worthless, merely that it is not part of the traditional narrative of 1. Moon 2. Mars 3. ? 4. FTL to distant stars 5.Profit
We are never going to get outside the solar system in any meaningful way unless physics changes a lot, so any exploration of our backyard will be valuable.
I just think any attempt beyond the traditional approach will benefit the soul of the human race, as much as it will give us Teflon.
At more than 90 bar, the lower atmosphere of Venus is basically made up of supercritical CO2, making it more or less a question of taste whether to call it an atmosphere or an ocean. Indeed, floating cities have been suggested as a way that man could actually live on the planet. High up in the atmosphere, the pressure and temperature would actually be quite livable.
"The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane."
"A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)"
personally I think the soviet exploration of venus is a great example of top-notch engineering combined with long-term executive support. I eagerly stared at the photos from venera (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps-faculty/space-history/venus) when I first saw them. They deployed an amazing amount of technology, continuously improved their designs, and ultimately collected real science data in a very demanding environment.
One day I hope the humanity will credit the Soviet Union for what it really was -- a technocratic meritocracy, where scientific progress and enormous projects of planetary scale mattered more than daily preferences of spoiled individuals.
Hopefully one day such a society will emerge again, and this time they will not dismantle themselves over having Coke and Levi's. Having lived in USSR -- no, we seriously didn't break up because of human rights issues. We just simply wanted Coke and Levi's.
As born in the USSR I can confirm that the USSR was a much better place to live in than modern Russia from almost any point of view: the best education system, better and affordable healthcare, practically no crime (if to compare with modern Russia), books and movies of much better quality than the flood of post-modern shit we have now, zero unemployment rate etc...
As a Jew born in the USSR that soon emigrated, I've thankfully avoided the harrowing experiences my parents and grandparents had to go through. Comparing favorably to a kleptocracy that used Capitalism as a false flag just as much as the old oligarchy used Socialism isn't the sort of glowing recommendation I think you intended.
I was born in Russia in 1984; it was pretty great to me, because a) young kids don't notice as much of society's ills, and b) I'm the grandchild of a well respected academic.
Life was pretty good for me and my family; not so good for my friend, who had to share a two bedroom apartment with two other families.
(I feel that books, movies, etc. are pretty subjective - I like the flood of post-modern shit we live in. You might have to dig a little harder to find diamonds, but there are more of them.)
Clicked on a random one, Igor Tamm - Wikipedia says that "some sources" describe him as Jewish. They're all print books, and I'm not willing to grab them all to settle a meaningless internet argument, but I'd wager that he was not considered Jewish at the time.
In any case, alright; some Jewish scientists did fine. Others didn't. We can praise the things the USSR did well without white-washing its history altogether.
Meritocracy? Really? Then explain Lysenko, for example, who single-handedly, thanks to his political clout with Stalin and Krushchev, set Soviet agriculture, genetics and biology research back several decades. For severall years, going against Lysenko's theories was actually illegal.
And you can feel free to arrange your own little Soviet state. For my part, my marxist views would most likely have gotten me sent to Siberia or worse, so I'd much rather stay clear.
Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly as many people died due to Stalinism than did in the entirety of WWII. It was a horrorshow. A violent, oppressive regime that murdered millions and caused misery for millions more? Technocratic meritocracy? Bullshit. It was always about political favoritism. When smart people were in political favor maybe good shit got done, when dumb people were in political favor, well, shit got fucked. Lysenkoism is hardly a ringing endorsement for communism. Nor is the Venera program for that matter. Was it worth tens of millions butchered? Tens of millions enslaved under brutal conditions in labor camps? Tens of millions living lives of fear and hopelessness?
When scientific progress mattered more, so why was cybernetics considered bourgeois pseudoscience?
Also, how can you progress on planetary scale, when there's shortage of toilet paper?
It seems that USA has many kinds of treatments for cancer these days - a manifestation of recent scientific progress obviously. What is the typical way very poor people to get it (or lets say even a chemistry teacher, who obviously cannot be poor in a reasonable society)? (But toilet paper is obviously important as well).
I've wondered if a modern day manned flyby mission might make sense. A rover could be landed on Venus more easily than on Mars, but it would, by necessity, have a very short lifetime on the surface. Once it's out of coolant, the mission is over. So if you were going to land a rover (or rovers) on the surface of Venus, you'd need to maximize their effectiveness. One way to do this would be to teleoperate them in near real-time, which could be done if rover landing were coordinated with a manned flyby.
A manned flyby of Venus would be substantially cheaper and less risky than a manned mission to Mars. There's no manned landing component, and the flyby mission itself would take a little over a year, which is pushing the limit for human exposure to micogravity, but within the range that we have actual experience.
This kind of mission will, of course, only make sense if you are an advocate of manned space exploration in the first place.