NASA Plans To Establish Human Colony Floating On Venus Clouds

Jay Gotera Friday, December 19, 2014

An artist's illustration of airships floating above Venus. Below, what it might look like from the cockpit of a floating airship. At upper right, an illustration of the planets and their approximate distances to the Sun. At lower right, a depiction of the hellish surface of Venus. | NASA / ESA / Wikimedia Commons images

At a time when the world's attention is focused on Mars following recent findings of possible signs of life there, here comes NASA pointing to another planet – Venus – where humans could live.

A research group in NASA has unveiled a detailed plan to eventually establish a human outpost on the clouds above Venus. The mission is called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or HAVOC.

Venus is "probably the most Earth-like environment that's out there," said Chris Jones of NASA's Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Right now, HAVOC is just an idea, Jones said, but if it is fully implemented, it would lead to floating cities on Venus where humans would live in small compartments attached to the bellies of helium-filled, solar-powered airships.

Between Mars and Venus, NASA scientists favor Venus as a first destination for human space explorers. Venus is usually much closer to Earth than Mars, meaning astronauts could complete a round-trip mission in about 440 days, including a month-long stay in the planet's atmosphere, HAVOC team member Dale Arney told IEEE Spectrum. A similar trip to Mars would take at least 500 days.

"If you did Venus first, you could get a leg up on advancing those technologies and those capabilities ahead of doing a human-scale Mars mission. It's a chance to do a practice run, if you will, of going to Mars," Arney said.

Venus also has other big advantages over Mars, scientists say. First, power would be no problem. With solar panels on airships, explorers would have all the power they would need. Venus gets 40 percent more solar energy than Earth and 240 times more than Mars. Since there would be an atmosphere present, the airship could use electrical power to spin turbines for propulsion, the scientists say.

They say Venus is also safer for humans. Fifty kilometers above the surface of the planet, Venus' upper atmosphere offers ample protection from radiation, scientists say. Mars, on the other hand, would expose astronauts to 40 times more radiation than on Earth.

Venus is more similar in mass to Earth, which means the human body could adjust to the gravity on Venus more readily than on Mars, the scientists say.

The upper atmosphere of Venus where the human airships could float also has a tolerable temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit and atmospheric pressure comparable to Earth's at sea level, they say.

"Given that Venus's upper atmosphere is a fairly hospitable destination, we think it can play a role in humanity's future in space," Arney said.

However, human colonies are only possible up in the clouds of Venus and not on the surface of the planet where the temperature is nearly 500 degrees Celsius -- hot enough to melt lead -- and where atmospheric pressures are 90 times denser than Earth's at sea level. Moreover, scientists say the Venutian atmosphere is toxic –carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. A Russian space probe that once landed on Venus lasted barely an hour before it got fried.

NASA says what makes the establishment of human colonies on Venus even more feasible is that the technology and materials needed to implement the mission are already available.

For instance, NASA has already tested the Teflon coatings that could be used to protect the solar cells and other parts of the airship from the sulfuric acid of Venus' atmosphere.

Meanwhile the European Space Agency said its Venus Express probe is now out of control and has gone "gently into the night" after exhausting its fuel.

Venus Express was launched in 2005 to map out the planet's weather systems. During the past eight years the craft has sent back images from one of the more bizarre places in the solar system.

The probe's cameras sent pictures of a constant 2,000 mile-wide storm with twin eyes that rages on the south pole of Venus. The probe's atmospheric testing equipment also found evidence that the planet could once have had significant quantities of water and the materials for life as we know it.