
Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus - djmdjm
http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venus.htm
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curtis
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.

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lifeisstillgood
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.

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curtis
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.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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.

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

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arethuza
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon)

~~~
Wingman4l7
The only aerobots so far deployed on another planet, no less!

~~~
raverbashing
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.

~~~
pantalaimon
relevant what-if

[http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/)

~~~
arethuza
"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."

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dekhn
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](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.

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

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Roboprog
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)

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MentalLandscape
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.

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sssilver
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.

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lafar6502
Maybe it deserves credit for R&D and engineering talent, but certainly not for
what USSR really was.

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versale
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...

~~~
anateus
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.

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nroose
That's a very venerable program.

