Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus(mentallandscape.com)

121 pointsby djmdjm12 anni fa39 comments

http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm

7 comments

curtis12 anni fa

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.

keeperofdakeys12 anni fa

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.

MentalLandscape12 anni fa

The Soviets also considered manned fly-by missions to Mars and Venus.

http://donpmitchell.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/heavy-interplan...

lifeisstillgood12 anni fa

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"

Gets my vote.

curtis12 anni fa

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.

lifeisstillgood12 anni fa

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.

Xenmen12 anni fa

Relatedly, Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Space as culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxnCzz5oQE

I'd agree with the both of you on the value of big space exploration projects as driving our culture.

curtis12 anni fa

> 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.

I totally agree with you there.

rdl12 anni fa

Not requiring a landing means you could basically do it with what, 3 Falcon Heavy launches at most? So O($1-10b)?

arethuza12 anni fa

I had no idea there had been robotic balloons (aerobots) flying 54km up in the atmosphere of Venus!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

Wingman4l712 anni fa

The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!

raverbashing12 anni fa

To be fair, the air density of Venus is much better for that than, let's say, Mars

However, the Atmosphere composition makes it worse.

Klapaucius12 anni fa

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.

mhurron12 anni fa

And it could operate at the fringes of the Empire.

mastry0da12 anni fa

just small enough where the empire wouldn't bother...

pantalaimon12 anni fa

relevant what-if

http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

arethuza12 anni fa

"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."

BrandonMarc12 anni fa

"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?)"

lifeisstillgood12 anni fa

>> But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax

Oh brother, can't I vote for him ?

dekhn12 anni fa

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.

qwerta12 anni fa

There is a lot of interesting stuff in soviet space program.

For example the Vostok spacecraft (Gagarin) is still used on orbit 50 years latter for biological experiments.

_random_12 anni fa

Simple and reliable, just like T-34 and AK-47.

Roboprog12 anni fa

Am I the only one who noticed the "works best with IE" notice at the bottom of the page? There's gotta be a "Soviet Russia" joke in there somewhere...

(kudos on the probe history, though, as the US has largely ignored Venus, Magellan not withstanding)

MentalLandscape12 anni fa

Haha. I just like the Calibri font. Maybe all browsers can use it now. Otherwise, the whole site is just very vanilla HTML typed into wordpad.

sssilver12 anni fa

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.

lafar650212 anni fa

Maybe it deserves credit for R&D and engineering talent, but certainly not for what USSR really was.

versale12 anni fa

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...

anateus12 anni fa

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.

pavel_lishin12 anni fa

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.)

pavel_lishin12 anni fa

> a technocratic meritocracy

Unless you're Jewish.

sssilver12 anni fa

pavel_lishin12 anni fa

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.

cgh12 anni fa

How about this guy?

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--...

[deleted]12 anni fa

vidarh12 anni fa

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.

InclinedPlane12 anni fa

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?

dang12 anni fa

I know you were provoked by a trollish comment, but it should be obvious that this not an appropriate post for Hacker News.

All: this indignant political subthread is off topic.

rebolek12 anni fa

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?

_random_12 anni fa

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).

nroose12 anni fa

That's a very venerable program.