NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration

by sohkamyung • 12 years ago

127 90 12 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

chriskanan• 12 years ago

Wouldn't our ability to learn about more than the atmosphere of Venus be extremely impaired from an airship? If one of the goals is ultimately colonization, how would we harvest materials beyond those available in the atmosphere? Even robots would have great difficulty doing this task for us due to Venus' hellish conditions on the ground, assuming they could get the materials back up to the sky city or airship.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

Actually, one suggestion has been colonizing Venus in floating cities: http://www.universetoday.com/15570/colonizing-venus-with-flo...

danielweber• 12 years ago

Colonization includes expansion.

For now assume that all the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen you want is available in the atmosphere and solar power. You still need hydrogen to make plastics, and you are going to need silicon to build more solar panels, and you need metals you can forge. The surface of Venus is 50km below, which isn't as far away as the ISS, but it's still 50km straight down and then back up for anything.

It might be a nice vacation spot, or a penal colony.

wtracy• 12 years ago

If EVA isn't even an option, what exactly is this manned mission supposed to accomplish that an entirely robotic one can't? It seems like a manned mission purely for the sake of being a manned mission.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Eva is an option in general, just not for that planned mission. The problem with Venus isnt the temperature and pressure, it's that the ground is too far down. At air ship altitude it's comfortable except for the acid.

thearn4• 12 years ago

My guess is the main advantage is feasibility - a manned airship-like laboratory in the upper atmosphere of Venus is something we could likely accomplish sooner than a manned mission to Mars, if we chose to make that a priority. Though the scientific benefit of such an effort would largely be secondary to other considerations. But that is fairly normal in the politics of human spaceflight.

aethertap2• 12 years ago

It sounds like one of their main arguments is that it would be a less difficult and/or dangerous way to get some experience with medium to long-term human habitats on other planets, partially in preparation for a Mars trip. Also, while robots can do any specific experiment we devise before the trip, it's much harder to make one that can support improvisation or hacking together a follow-up experiment if an interesting result is found. The pace of iteration for experiments would probably be much higher with a human present.

gambiting• 12 years ago

I would argue that you could get that experience by establishing a colony on the bottom of the ocean. Conditions there are also deadly to human life without protection, and getting there and back is also not easy. Not as hard as getting to a different planet, but if we want to learn how to sustain human life in artificial habitats, then a colony 10km under water sounds like a way to start.

Amezarak• 12 years ago

It sounds like one of their main arguments is that it would be a less difficult and/or dangerous way to get some experience with medium to long-term human habitats on other planets, partially in preparation for a Mars trip.

I'm still not sure why we're interested in inhabiting Mars. Virtually no atmosphere and one-third of Earth's gravity means that humans will always have immense difficulty colonizing the planet. People who lived on Mars for any extended period of time, for example, would have huge difficulties in adjusting to Earth's gravity, if they could at all. People would always have to live in pressurized habitats.

Meanwhile Venus has a thick atmosphere and a much more Earthlike gravity. There's certainly huge problems with Venus (most obviously: it's very hot) but I can at least imagine with time and technological advances we could terraform the planet to be suitable for Earth life - all the raw material is there.

This is not to say, of course, that establishing some kind of manned scientific facility on Mars wouldn't be worthwhile. But long-term habitation? I just don't see it.

javert2• 12 years ago

what exactly is this manned mission supposed to accomplish that an entirely robotic one can't?

Honestly, to satisfy a bunch of people's personal science fetish using other people's money.

lukeschlather3• 12 years ago

From the atmosphere, humans can control surface probes in near real-time, enabling them to carry out experiments that are nearly impossible when you have to wait minutes to see the results of every action.

You look at the way the Rosetta/Philae mission went, there were a few things that went wrong with Philae that might have been addressed by a human crew if Rosetta had one.

For example, Philae had to do a fully autonomous landing, but a crew on Rosetta could potentially have piloted the lander in real-time and made course corrections to avoid the crash. More concretely, a thruster designed to keep Philae from bouncing was damaged - a human crew could have repaired it before releasing the lander.

dalke3• 12 years ago

If Rosetta had an operations crew nearby - even just one person - the cost of the mission would have been, what, 100x greater? Surely enough more expensive to pay for multiple robotic probes.

Total mission cost for Rosetta = 1.4 billion Euros. It costs something like $50,000/kg for GEO, so I'll use that as the baseline. The Orion capsule weighs 21 tons and the Deep Space Habitat at least 50 tons. Add one person and the 5 kg of consumables per day, for a mission of 300 days, gives another 2 tons. That's $3 billion already, or 2.4 billion Euros. Now add the development costs, support staff, communications, etc. and you'll see that it's a lot cheaper to send a small fleet of redundant probes than to send a single human.

To double check, an Orion capture of an asteroid in an orbit close to Earth's is $2.6 billion (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29#Explorat... ), again, excluding development costs.

In any case, we have no way to put a human on the same orbit as a comet, much less return the human safely to Earth, so only a robot mission is possible.

3pt14159• 12 years ago

I've been advocating a Venus over Mars strategy for quite some time now. It is weird seeing your opinions hit the mainstream. On the one hand you are happy that other people have finally come around to your line of thinking, but on the other hand you worry that others will repeat the conclusion with little idea of the reasoning that went behind it.

I was also ahead of the curve on the simulation argument. When Elon Musk started talking about it I realized it was finally becoming mainstream. I'm hoping he gets on board with a Venus first space exploration too!

javert2• 12 years ago

What is the "simulation argument"? I read the article but don't remember that.

nitrogen4• 12 years ago

It's a fallacious extrapolation of Moore's law into the idea that our universe must be a computer simulation (of course there's more to it than my flippant summary suggests, but I still find the arguments unconvincing even if the idea itself is interesting).

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

A philosophical bauble: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

The idea is that if computers continue to become more and more powerful, then we'll run more and more simulations on them, including simulations of ourselves; and if we can simulate consciousness, as some suggest, the the statistical likelihood is that we are living in a simulation, because it the least computationally expensive assumption. Conversely, if we're not living in a simulation then either we will never be able to simulate consciousness or there will be some other factor that makes it an unpopular activity.

3rd3• 12 years ago

What does all of this have to do with the simulation argument?

whoisthemachine2• 12 years ago

And actually, one of the things that's not mentioned is the other extremely advantageous feature of Venus: plenty of energy to extract, in already combustible or nearly combustible form, which would be nice to have if humanity is to become an interplanetary species. It also helps that the planet is almost certainly devoid of lifeforms.

yongjik• 12 years ago

According to Wikipedia, Venus's atmosphere is 96.5% CO2, 3.5% N2, and trace amounts of other stuff. Not sure what "combustible form" of energy you are talking about?

skorgu• 12 years ago

"...at 50km, the abundance [of H2SO4] works out to ~14mg/m^3 or about 7ppm. So, between sulfuric acid and water vapor, you have about half as much mass per cubic meter as water vapor in the air near the ALMA observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile. Bone dry by terrestrial standards, but sopping wet compared to say the Moon." [0]

That plus higher-than-earth solar radiation to electrolyze it into H2 and O2 and you've got yourself a floating, solar-powered rocket fuel mine.

[0] http://selenianboondocks.com/2013/11/venus-isru-what-do-we-h...

whoisthemachine2• 12 years ago

Yeah sorry my sleeping through Gen Chem all those years ago really showed in that comment. I did however do some research and CO2 seems useful for storing energy, so that is interesting in it's own right, especially given the amounts of sunlight and wind present on that planet. [1]

I also want to backtrack on the "the planet is almost certainly devoid of lifeforms" comment, as it seems there has been speculation that the clouds of Venus do host life. [2]

[1] http://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/electrochemi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Possibility...

diltonm• 12 years ago

This is encouraging. I've wondered for several years why Mars when you've got places like Venus as potentially more interesting locations. Doing long term atmospheric existence there could teach us a lot about what we don't know about space travel and our ability to push ourselves. If I didn't have two bad discs and was 3 decades younger; I'd be asking where to sign up.

Edit: Reading further, "while the crewed version would be nearly 130 meters long, or twice the size of a Boeing 747.". NASA needs to get much bolder in their thinking. Two people isn't enough. You need at least the size of a submarine crew to make it work and that means an airship 5000 meters long.

Edit 2: "At this point, things get crazy.". Well, it wouldn't be worth it otherwise.

delecti• 12 years ago

Obviously getting to the moon is step one. Getting to Venus and Mars are at least on a comparable level of difficulty, and Mars is much more like the moon than Venus is, so we're already used to getting around it.

I think it's more a case of going with the devil you know, even if Venus might be better overall for various reasons.

afterburner• 12 years ago

Nah, just send one of those amazingly retro Russian landers again: http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Venera-9_lander_...

ant6n• 12 years ago

Within the CO2 atmosphere of Venus, air is a lifting gas. One could make large balloons out of air which double up as habitats for humans. Make it large and thin enough, and a dome-city would be a balloon on Venus.

fsloth3• 12 years ago

I love the idea but could you lay out the numbers (I'm a bit busy...)?

prawn• 12 years ago

This won't help with specifics, but there have been past discussions (HN?) about tethered floating cities on Earth that rely on heated air within the space to keep them afloat. I think one of those discussions had vague figures, from memory.

pharke3• 12 years ago

Mostly from sources regarding hot air balloon flight and I don't in any way claim to be qualified in this area but:

Normal Air Mixture, Dry at sea level (1013.25 hPa) and 20 degrees Celsius: 1.205 kg/m3

Normal Air Mixture, Dry at sea level (1013.25 hPa) and 100 degrees Celsius: 0.946 kg/m3

Difference: 0.259 kg/m3

C02 at sea level (1013.25 hPa) and 20 degrees Celsius: 1.829 kg/m3

Difference from Normal Air at 20 deg C: 0.637 kg/m3

C02 at seal level (1013.25 hPa) and 75 degrees Celsius: 1.541 kg/m3

Difference from Normal Air at 20 deg C: 0.336 kg/m3

As you can see, by these rough numbers a normal air mixture as present on Earth should theoretically be able to act as a lifting gas at least equivalent to hot air given the conditions in the layer of the Venusian atmosphere that the article is considering. Feel free to correct if you see any obvious errors, I just used the ideal gas law and some figures for gas constants I found on engineeringtoolbox.com and I'm definitely not a physicist by any means.

q22• 12 years ago

Humans are given earth and they polluted it, destroyed its environment in the name of development and now going after Mars or Venus...etc.

There may be some entities with good intentions in exploration but over a period of time, entities with evil intentions may join and story will be same like on earth, only timeline, tools, people, circumstances, places will be different.

NeverEnough2• 12 years ago

life on earth isn't sustainable anyway. how can you not be aware of that?

the sun is dying. if humans don't 'develop' enough before then, it is unlikely that any of earth's legacy will be preserved.

q22• 12 years ago

It takes billions of years for sun to die.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-j-eicher/14-things-you-d...

Moreover, if sun dies, how Mars/Venus will help us? They are in our solar system. Is n't it?

So we need not worry. Moreover if death is natural process, then some alternative star may born by that time. As of now, Science may not be that much advanced to capture new star.

But that won't give a reason to destroy/pollute earth and move on. Can you guarantee it won't happen to Mars or Venus?

It is just fear mongering, nothing else.

scrumper2• 12 years ago

Humans weren't 'given' earth - we evolved from the survivors of the last mass extinction event, alongside and in competition with everything else here. We have no more right to survival than a termite, say, but we have the same right to shape our landscape to suit our needs. Expansion beyond earth is a logical and necessary manifestation of the survival strategy our species employs: applied intelligence.

Enlightened self interest requires that we treat other forms of life on earth better, but only because that same applied intelligence shows us how connected our own survival is to theirs. Equally, that same self interest should encourage us to study and preserve indigenous life on other planets, since it may provide knowledge which assists our own survival on those planets.

gd1• 12 years ago

I don't think there was any discussion in the link about how they would get back into orbit? Did I miss it?

jccooper3• 12 years ago

Yeah, that's a pretty sticky part. Venus has appx earth gravity and atmosphere at that point, so you'd need an Earth-class launcher to get off; something at least like an Atlas or Titan II. The launcher itself we could get there reasonably, but the propellant, well... that's an awful lot of mass to send to Venus. It gets much easier if you can do ISRU, which may be easier on Venus, but is still a novel development project.

EDIT: after further reading the article...

In the article it shows that most of the payload (60k kg out of the 70k kg payload) of the airship module is the ascent vehicle. Each of the two transit modules is launched by what looks like 4 Delta IVs and one SLS Block2--each. (Plus two crew capsule launches at each end of the mission for Earth departure and return.) So I guess they have some mass to work with. Heck of a launch schedule.

That 60k kg ascent rocket is just a bit bigger than the Pegasus XL, which can launch 443 kg. A Mercury capsule is 1200kg. Granted the ascent capsule doesn't need a heat shield, but that's not a lot of rocket for two people.

scrumper2• 12 years ago

You did - there's a rocket ship attached to the bottom of the airship (accounting for 6/7ths of the mass of the airship IIRC).

jvickers• 12 years ago

In order to go to Mars, and come back quickly and safely, it would make sense to send supplies of various sorts on a robotic mission (or a number of them). This way there would be plenty of fuel on Mars.

Another possibility would be having a launchpad in Earth orbit, so that many different modules would be assembled (a lot like the ISS), but in a configuration that's designed to travel to Mars. Launching it all at once from Earth does not seem like the safest or most efficient answer to getting a very large mission payload into space, given current technology. This way, there would be allowances for failed launches, while the human crew is brought into orbit using more tried and tested methods (with sufficient rescue mission planning), on a much smaller budget than the whole mission cost.

Some kind of Exploratory Space Station seems like the way to do it.

outworlder2• 12 years ago

Launching it all at once from Earth does not seem like the safest or most efficient answer to getting a very large mission payload into space, given current technology

Or any non-scifi technology that we know of. The rocket equation is harsh.

masklinn• 12 years ago

Even scifi generally does assembly in space. Short of the ability to teleport stuff outside the gravity well for free Δv remains much more manageable by sending lots of smaller payloads.

grondilu• 12 years ago

It's definitely worth considering. At the very least, they could make a demonstration mission with a small, unmanned airship.

Also, question: 50km is pretty high, but is this too high for any chance of visibility to the ground? Such a mission would be much more interesting if it was possible to view at least a bit of the surface.

krampian• 12 years ago

Direct line of sight probably would be off the table because of the thick cloud layer in the Venusian atmosphere. Radar imaging as has been previously been done by orbiting probes should certainly be possible. More interestingly, it seems to me the airships would be good launching pads for all kinds of unmanned drones which could go down from there to take a look and return to base later.

rwhitman• 12 years ago

If you're interested in the topic of Venus colonization, I read this article a few weeks ago and loved it: http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/will_we_build_colon...

pharke3• 12 years ago

Some interesting opinions here, but I can't agree with his speculation that you could build a floating habitat from wood and cotton cloth. He also seems to have gotten the concentrations of C02 and N mixed up as he believes the latter is abundant (on Venus) when it is actually ~3% If it were the reverse as he believes, normal air would not be a lifting gas.

peter303• 12 years ago

NASA has a huge number of exciting proposals, but can only fund a handful of them per decade. I thought the end of the Shuttle would free up money for robotic exploration. But science and manned exploration are separate budgets.

bunderbunder• 12 years ago

And they probably should be. Otherwise NASA's money for science would end up being sacrificed as a burnt offering to executive and congressional diddling, too. The spend on manned exploration expands to consume all available space.

Case in point: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/12/15/nasas-3...

nickhalfasleep• 12 years ago

I think venus holds more promise for massive teraforming. I can't find the link but calculations have been done about spinning a large occluding shield at the L1 Lagrange point to cool the surface over a few hundred years. Then with proper reflectivity adjustments, the surface could be made earth-normal. Heck, take all the extra CO2 and boost it to Mars to help them fill their greenhouses.

Lambdanaut• 12 years ago

Interesting idea, but Mars isn't lacking in CO2. I'm not sure if shipping it there from Venus would be economically feasible for a long time.

seanflyon2• 12 years ago

I think Venus is short on hydrogen to make water. terraforming might require scooping large quantities of hydrogen from Jupiter and using it to burn off some the the CO2 producing water and carbon.

dr_zoidberg• 12 years ago

To everyone asking "why" or "what for", please read [1] and [2]. The data behind may not be as abundant as other studies, but the conditions are met in Venus and extremophiles could already be living in the upper atmosphere. A mission like this one could potentially take exobiology from theoretical to empirical.

Alternatively, we could take extremophiles cultures from earth, take a sample of venusian atmosphere, and study their survival in such an environment -- of course, taking care not to contaminate the atmosphere.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110807004311/http://gltrs.grc.n...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Possibility...

NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration

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