Let's start from the very beginning: do you understand that both temperature and pressure decline with altitude?
(Let's also take the chance to correct a common misconception: there's no sulfuric acid on the surface of Venus; it's not stable in those conditions. At the surface, it's sulfur dioxide. There is sulfuric acid in the middle cloud layer, but more like a vog than an "acid bath" - it's so sparse that visibility is several kilometers)
Long term Venus has an even bigger "But why?" problem than Mars.
Venus has over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium than Earth. Venus has much higher energy resources than Earth. Venus is located in a place with a strong Oberth effect (easier to launch probes to the outer solar system). Venus has fast transits to Earth. Venus is easier to live on than Mars (much more Earthlike) environment in the middle cloud layer). Venus's atmosphere acts like a "refinery" to some extent, baking / eroding chemicals out of rock and precipitating them at various layers of the atmosphere. Venus's surface has been exposed to very different (and generally favorable) enrichment processes relative to other places in the solar system. Venus has little to no overburden. Etc, etc, etc.
Since you're on the surface you have the potential to start making fields of solar arrays, greenhouses, excavate underground structures, mining and refining
On Venus, your habitat is a solar array. Is a greenhouse. A truly massive one in both regards, with - unlike Mars - tons of sunlight and Earthlike pressures. There's no need to excavate anything. The planet "mines" itself of many numerous resources and passes them right through your propulsion.
Venus will essentially be an orbiting spaceship
**Facepalm**
Once again: We're not talking about the surface, and we're not talking about orbit. We're talking about the middle cloud layer.
At least not in any way that we couldn't do with remote control from earth, since it'd be remote control to the surface anyway. On Mars there's at least the potential for human/robot co-projects or mobile robot supervisors,
There is a far better case to be made for local operators on Venus than on Mars, in that robots on the surface are much more time-limited on Venus than on Mars, so communications delays matter much more. On Mars, so what if your rover sits idle for a while? It's getting so little power from the sun that it needs time to charge (if it's solar powered) regardless. And speaking of rovers, both the habitat and its surface probes are vastly more mobile on Venus. With a Mars habitat, you're stuck using only the resources found near where you settled; the further away, the more onerous delivery of materials becomes. With a Venus habitat, the whole planet is yours from a single habitat (although it's easiest, in the beginning, to stick to the high latitudes of a single hemisphere).
I'm hoping we'll start with something that's at least a semi-permanent presence like a new crew going every 2.5 years when the launch window is optimal,
Speaking of that, Venus has more frequent launch windows.
I think before you start talking about airships as potential habitats, you need something a bit longer than that
Wikipedia gives a reference for the latter - "Kite balloons to airships: the Navy's lighter-than-air experience", ed. Roy A. Grossnick, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987". The former record was 1928 and the latter 1958, so both are ages ago. But all this is irrelevant; in both cases, they're not limited by the airship, but by supplies (in particular, fuel). The whole point of a colony, versus a base, is that you produce your own supplies. Nobody has done this on Earth because there's zero economic case for doing so.
Meaning, how much energy do you need to cool from 800 degrees Fahrenheit, versus how much energy do you need to heat from 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit
How can you have continually missed this?
We are not talking about the surface.
We are talking about the Earthlike middle cloud layer. Care to try your post again?
(And to top it off, you're wrong about cooling energy, too. Google "coefficient of performance" for starters. You're also wrong about radiation; Venus's atmosphere is quite effective at radiation shielding, unlike Mars' atmosphere)
ED: That should read "there's not even a large thermosphere temperature spike" like there is on Earth. You can see the temperature profiles here (I can dig up some graphics for higher up if you'd like)
Nobody is talking about the surface of Venus. If you're not going to read the linked document, you could at least read the above comments.
Venus's middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. Earthlike pressures, temperatures, gravity, sunlight, sufficient radiation shielding, etc.
There's a sweet spot you have to balance on on Venus - too low and you crash, too high and you burn up
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Venus gets colder as you increase in altitude (there's not even a thermosphere), not hotter. The actual constraints for manned missions are the pressure to temperature ratio (which is more optimal closer to the poles). There's several kilometers acceptable variation for the long term, with allowable deeper excursions in the short term. The optimal altitude also changes day/night, but so does lift.
This is due to material constraints - you're pretty much limited to teflon and other plastics as coatings due to the sulfuric acid atmosphere. Metals would corrode.
I'm not sure what blimps you've seen with metal envelopes...
BTW, you wouldn't use teflon, although it was used in the Vega balloons. The gas permeability is too high, the tensile strength too low, and workability too poor. We have much better fluoropolymers nowadays. Some are even used on blimps on Earth, such as tedlar used in the Zeppelin NT (the new Goodyear Blimp series). Also, you wouldn't use a single material; you'd use a laminate. Fluoropolymers have superb chemical resistance, UV resistance and anti-fouling properties, but they're also heavy, contain fluorine (limited in ISRU), have poorer tensile strength, and there are better permeability solutions in many regards. Fluoropolymers make superb surface layers / coatings, atop biaxially-oriented non-fluoropolymer substrates.
If you go to high the plastics melt (or at least will become soft allowing any stresses in the hull to crack them open
Actually, the polymers in question tend to have quite high melting points. The ideal from a melting point perspective would be liquid crystal polymers (PBO / PIBO can actually operate at or near the surface), but they're opaque. But fluoropolymers and most good barrier/tensile layers have excellent thermal stability. We're not talking polypropylene here.
If components of the structure bump into eachother good luck with that because a scratch on the coating will likewise cause corrosion of the inner materials in a matter of days
First of, you overestimate Venus's atmosphere; it's more like a dense smog (or more accuragely, vog) than an acid bath. The sulfuric acid concentrations are a couple to a couple dozen milligrams per cubic meter. By contrast, OSHA allows workers to breathe up to 1mg per cubic meter for an entire 8-hour shift. Now, the sulfuric acid concentration on Venus is higher than sulfuric acid mists on Earth, but still, it puts it into perspective. You also grossly overestimate how quickly a leak cycles air in and out of an airship.
One of the most notable characteristics of most fluoropolymers is specifically that they are very resistant to scratching and have low coefficients of friction. Beyond this, damage (ranging from pinholes to large gashes) can be repaired, by a number of means discussed in the document. Some of them, such as Lockheed's "SPIDER" system, are even automatic.
The plastics themselves will have a lifetime of about 20-30 years at best in those conditions even if nothing goes wrong, so you will have to constant be recoating everything to keep it stable
Everything has a lifespan. For every colony on every planet. ISRU is essential for a colony to be permanent.
and as far as I am aware there are no hydrocarbons on venus to make more
Literally half of the linked document is on ISRU, you might want to check that out.
On Mars it could all go to Hell, politicians could bicker about whether or not to allow it to happen again for another several decades, and if they finally restart it most of the equipment will need at most the dust wiped off and some welding to function again
As far as I know currently available lithium batteries still wear out after 1,000 cycles and slightly more for LiFePo4.
Powerpacks are warrantied for 10 years, and it's not like they just suddenly "die" after that. Li-ions suffer their most capacity drop in their first year of operation / first 50-100 cycles, but the rate of loss declines after that. As an example with Teslas, the average capacity loss is 4% in the first year, but by year 5, typical total capacity loss averages only 6-7%.
1) Despite the name, there just isn't that much lithium in a lithium-ion battery - and thus battery manufacturers can pay significantly more and not profoundly affect battery prices. 2) "Reserves" figures are based on a given A) exploration level, B) production tech level, and C) market price point. A) has historically been low, B) hasn't had reason to advance much, and C)... well, see point #1. 3) Growth in reserves with respect to 2A is roughly linear, while it's exponential with respect to 2B and 2C.
As an example of extremes: there's approximately 2,4e17 kilograms of lithium in Earth's oceans. Yes, producing from seawater with current tech (see 2B) costs a few times more than producing from land-based lithium sources per kilogram, so it's not commercially done. But battery manufacturers certainly can afford to pay those prices. And because of that, it's essentially impossible for them to run out of lithium. There can be temporary shortfalls due to production scaleups, but no long-term barriers.
(Not that they would go straight to seawater lithium; there's lots of land-based sources far larger than current "reserves" that would be turned to first)
We absolutely can; we've been making airships since 1852. If you're asking why nobody's made a farm in one and lived in one, where's the economic case for that?
You could just read the document. There's many ways to enter from orbit, including the traditional (aeroshells), but also some more advanced concepts in advanced states of research such as ballutes and inflatable lifting bodies. These offer gentler deceleration at a lower mass penalty. The VAMP mission proposal for Venus, for example, is a lifting body example - the same inflated wing that functions as an entry lifting body / radiator also keeps it aloft in the atmosphere.
Then have to slow down to "hover" there
There is no need to "hover". The speed simply has to be reduced to a rate that you can inflate while falling as much as a few dozen kilometers.
Ballutes are particularly interesting in this regard as you can fill ballonets (or equivalent inter-lift-cell space) with ram air. You only need the (comparably very small) amount of stored gas to be released during freefall. Hypersonic ballutes are a mature technology, and have even been used as drag devices for manned spacecraft. Once inflated with ram air, the habitat presents a huge cross section and thus very slow descent rate.
The HAVOC proposal (which has studied the freefall inflation case in detail) used stored helium as its lifting gas (although their tankage mass estimates are very optimistic; HAVOC had a much more challenging design, in that it carries all of its ascent stage mass during atmospheric entry and made no use of ram air). More interesting than helium would be the decomposition of liquids (such as ammonia and hydrogen peroxide) and solids (such as ammonium salts), which store with low tankage masses and yield gases more desirable for a habitat (the hydrogen fraction is in particular valuable, whether (temporarily) as hydrogen gas, or as (more desirable) water). In the case of ammonia, it doesn't even need to be decomposed immediately; simply allowing it to vaporize on its own inside an envelope can provide significant lift (but decomposition doubles the number of moles of gas).
It's important to reiterate that, unlike HAVOC, the initial habitat mass is a tiny fraction of its ultimate mass. As any sustainable habitat requires ISRU, it's arriving with none of the things that ultimately make it heavy (propellant, water, and of course there's no ascent stage docked until people arrive). Hence, the initial inflation requires only a tiny percentage of the final inflation.
The mass figures for supplying the initial lofting gases are included in the linked document.
If you don't land on the planet, you have to ensure that you can remain in orbit.
Incorrect again. Is it really that hard for you to read even the introduction in the above link? Venus habitation is about settlement in the middle cloud layer, not orbit.
About using balloons: If that was a feasible way to get payloads into an orbit
Or for that matter, to even read the very post you're replying to? "Venus sample return mission designs use balloons to get out of the dense lower layers." Not to orbit - only out of the lower layers. A very small balloon provides a very large amount of lift in Venus's lower atmosphere. The vast majority of that "27 km/s" dV is about plowing through the lower atmosphere, which is sort of like trying to blast through water.
And to reiterate, all of this is irrelevant for a habitat lofted in the middle cloud layer.
On Mars if something goes to utter shit and everyone dies you can at least go back and start with almost the same resources before it failed. On Venus it just sinks to the surface, and the sulfuric acid rain ensures anything that cracks on impact is destroyed.
As discussed in the above, it's incredibly difficult to actually "sink" a Venus habitat. Beyond how slowly large airships actually leak, the vast majority of the habitat's lift is dedicated to lofting the propellant on the ascent stage and (depending on the design decisions) the ascent stage itself. Meaning in the worst case you can ditch your ascent propellant (or even the ascent stage itself) and stay aloft on a tiny fraction of your peak design lift.
The easiest expansion design is via the "airworm" layout, where you have individual envelopes joined one after the next, each acting as lift cells, but containing their own propulsion, power generation, etc, and being able to function fully on their own. Even in the event of the total loss of one cell, there's no effect on the remainder.
Sorry - this discussion was about manned travel, so I assumed you were talking about manned travel as well. Further robotic probes to Titan, I'm quite the supporter of that.:) Unfortunately, Mars gets the lion's share of the unmanned exploration budget, so....
Mostly because it's way, way harder to do than Mars. Personally, I'd guess it's pretty much impossible with current technology to do a manned mission to Venus.
The above link argues otherwise, in excruciating detail.
And I'm not even talking about the atmosphere yet. The dV budget required to get to a stable low orbit around Venus is already higher than for Mars
Not with aerocapture; it's actually slightly less. Venus also allows for much faster transfers, especially on return.
and as soon as you wish to land you are really in trouble
The requirement for an additional ascent stage is really Venus's one significant downside, but offset by numerous upsides relative to other destinations. And the very reason for that difficulty is itself a good thing: it's because Venus is so earthlike, and has the sort of gravity our bodies are adapted to.
Note also that I wouldn't use the word "land". Again, another one of the advantages of Venus is that you don't actually have to "land". There are no obstacles to avoid and your timing is much less critical; your deployment ellipse can be massive.
From the surface of Venus
Nobody is talking about the surface of Venus. And even if we were, you wouldn't be using rockets plowing through the dense lower atmosphere; Venus sample return mission designs use balloons to get out of the dense lower layers.
Titan will be an interesting destination** once we can get the trip times down; it has a number of things going for it, including reasonable pressures, minimal radiation, easy local mobility, and a fascinating scientific mission (and the thermal insulation requirements are lower than most people would imagine). But until trip times can come down, it's just too far.
** Assuming that that sort of level of gravity doesn't prove to be hazardous to human health.
There's been some interesting work with quantum capacitors, although it hasn't really gone anywhere. The concept is that at incredibly tiny scales, charge is quantized, and you can use this as an effective barrier to prevent dielectric breakdown. In theory, the only thing limiting the strength of your battery / capacitor is its internal tensile and compressive strengths. The unfortunate thing is that tensile and compressive strength limits are more limiting than we'd like, even if you could pull off such a quantum capacitor. In theory, you could get a good, but not "staggeringly awesome", battery with a quantum capacitor... but it's probably not worth the huge amount of research to try to bring such a thing to commercial production, if you even could.
There's also been some interesting conceptual work in storing energy in things like quantum electron traps, with electrons circling nanowires like particles in tiny particle accelerators - that one doesn't have the same sort of structural constraint problems. But that's again not gone past the conceptual stage.
Slashdot Mirror
Accessing its resources, adding redundancy to the human species, making use of its orbital dynamics, etc, etc. Numerous subcategories on each.
Wrong on both accounts: transparent, not windowless, and extremely massive open space.
With resources literally pouring right through your propulsion system.
**facepalm again**
Let's start from the very beginning: do you understand that both temperature and pressure decline with altitude?
(Let's also take the chance to correct a common misconception: there's no sulfuric acid on the surface of Venus; it's not stable in those conditions. At the surface, it's sulfur dioxide. There is sulfuric acid in the middle cloud layer, but more like a vog than an "acid bath" - it's so sparse that visibility is several kilometers)
Venus has over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium than Earth. Venus has much higher energy resources than Earth. Venus is located in a place with a strong Oberth effect (easier to launch probes to the outer solar system). Venus has fast transits to Earth. Venus is easier to live on than Mars (much more Earthlike) environment in the middle cloud layer). Venus's atmosphere acts like a "refinery" to some extent, baking / eroding chemicals out of rock and precipitating them at various layers of the atmosphere. Venus's surface has been exposed to very different (and generally favorable) enrichment processes relative to other places in the solar system. Venus has little to no overburden. Etc, etc, etc.
On Venus, your habitat is a solar array. Is a greenhouse. A truly massive one in both regards, with - unlike Mars - tons of sunlight and Earthlike pressures. There's no need to excavate anything. The planet "mines" itself of many numerous resources and passes them right through your propulsion.
**Facepalm**
Once again: We're not talking about the surface, and we're not talking about orbit. We're talking about the middle cloud layer.
There is a far better case to be made for local operators on Venus than on Mars, in that robots on the surface are much more time-limited on Venus than on Mars, so communications delays matter much more. On Mars, so what if your rover sits idle for a while? It's getting so little power from the sun that it needs time to charge (if it's solar powered) regardless. And speaking of rovers, both the habitat and its surface probes are vastly more mobile on Venus. With a Mars habitat, you're stuck using only the resources found near where you settled; the further away, the more onerous delivery of materials becomes. With a Venus habitat, the whole planet is yours from a single habitat (although it's easiest, in the beginning, to stick to the high latitudes of a single hemisphere).
Speaking of that, Venus has more frequent launch windows.
Wikipedia gives a reference for the latter - "Kite balloons to airships: the Navy's lighter-than-air experience", ed. Roy A. Grossnick, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987". The former record was 1928 and the latter 1958, so both are ages ago. But all this is irrelevant; in both cases, they're not limited by the airship, but by supplies (in particular, fuel). The whole point of a colony, versus a base, is that you produce your own supplies. Nobody has done this on Earth because there's zero economic case for doing so.
How can you have continually missed this?
We are not talking about the surface.
We are talking about the Earthlike middle cloud layer. Care to try your post again?
(And to top it off, you're wrong about cooling energy, too. Google "coefficient of performance" for starters. You're also wrong about radiation; Venus's atmosphere is quite effective at radiation shielding, unlike Mars' atmosphere)
ED: That should read "there's not even a large thermosphere temperature spike" like there is on Earth. You can see the temperature profiles here (I can dig up some graphics for higher up if you'd like)
Nobody is talking about the surface of Venus. If you're not going to read the linked document, you could at least read the above comments.
Venus's middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. Earthlike pressures, temperatures, gravity, sunlight, sufficient radiation shielding, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Venus gets colder as you increase in altitude (there's not even a thermosphere), not hotter. The actual constraints for manned missions are the pressure to temperature ratio (which is more optimal closer to the poles). There's several kilometers acceptable variation for the long term, with allowable deeper excursions in the short term. The optimal altitude also changes day/night, but so does lift.
I'm not sure what blimps you've seen with metal envelopes...
BTW, you wouldn't use teflon, although it was used in the Vega balloons. The gas permeability is too high, the tensile strength too low, and workability too poor. We have much better fluoropolymers nowadays. Some are even used on blimps on Earth, such as tedlar used in the Zeppelin NT (the new Goodyear Blimp series). Also, you wouldn't use a single material; you'd use a laminate. Fluoropolymers have superb chemical resistance, UV resistance and anti-fouling properties, but they're also heavy, contain fluorine (limited in ISRU), have poorer tensile strength, and there are better permeability solutions in many regards. Fluoropolymers make superb surface layers / coatings, atop biaxially-oriented non-fluoropolymer substrates.
Actually, the polymers in question tend to have quite high melting points. The ideal from a melting point perspective would be liquid crystal polymers (PBO / PIBO can actually operate at or near the surface), but they're opaque. But fluoropolymers and most good barrier/tensile layers have excellent thermal stability. We're not talking polypropylene here.
First of, you overestimate Venus's atmosphere; it's more like a dense smog (or more accuragely, vog) than an acid bath. The sulfuric acid concentrations are a couple to a couple dozen milligrams per cubic meter. By contrast, OSHA allows workers to breathe up to 1mg per cubic meter for an entire 8-hour shift. Now, the sulfuric acid concentration on Venus is higher than sulfuric acid mists on Earth, but still, it puts it into perspective. You also grossly overestimate how quickly a leak cycles air in and out of an airship.
One of the most notable characteristics of most fluoropolymers is specifically that they are very resistant to scratching and have low coefficients of friction. Beyond this, damage (ranging from pinholes to large gashes) can be repaired, by a number of means discussed in the document. Some of them, such as Lockheed's "SPIDER" system, are even automatic.
Everything has a lifespan. For every colony on every planet. ISRU is essential for a colony to be permanent.
Literally half of the linked document is on ISRU, you might want to check that out.
No, "the Tesla shareholder" would be saying, "Sell more batteries!" Scale of production is what reduces battery prices.
Powerpacks are warrantied for 10 years, and it's not like they just suddenly "die" after that. Li-ions suffer their most capacity drop in their first year of operation / first 50-100 cycles, but the rate of loss declines after that. As an example with Teslas, the average capacity loss is 4% in the first year, but by year 5, typical total capacity loss averages only 6-7%.
1) Despite the name, there just isn't that much lithium in a lithium-ion battery - and thus battery manufacturers can pay significantly more and not profoundly affect battery prices.
2) "Reserves" figures are based on a given A) exploration level, B) production tech level, and C) market price point. A) has historically been low, B) hasn't had reason to advance much, and C)... well, see point #1.
3) Growth in reserves with respect to 2A is roughly linear, while it's exponential with respect to 2B and 2C.
As an example of extremes: there's approximately 2,4e17 kilograms of lithium in Earth's oceans. Yes, producing from seawater with current tech (see 2B) costs a few times more than producing from land-based lithium sources per kilogram, so it's not commercially done. But battery manufacturers certainly can afford to pay those prices. And because of that, it's essentially impossible for them to run out of lithium. There can be temporary shortfalls due to production scaleups, but no long-term barriers.
(Not that they would go straight to seawater lithium; there's lots of land-based sources far larger than current "reserves" that would be turned to first)
Which makes paying $0,20/kWh for power all the more difficult, no?
Solar is starting to take over in sunny parts of the mainland even where power is much cheaper than that; its costs have gone way down over the years.
We absolutely can; we've been making airships since 1852. If you're asking why nobody's made a farm in one and lived in one, where's the economic case for that?
You could just read the document. There's many ways to enter from orbit, including the traditional (aeroshells), but also some more advanced concepts in advanced states of research such as ballutes and inflatable lifting bodies. These offer gentler deceleration at a lower mass penalty. The VAMP mission proposal for Venus, for example, is a lifting body example - the same inflated wing that functions as an entry lifting body / radiator also keeps it aloft in the atmosphere.
There is no need to "hover". The speed simply has to be reduced to a rate that you can inflate while falling as much as a few dozen kilometers.
Ballutes are particularly interesting in this regard as you can fill ballonets (or equivalent inter-lift-cell space) with ram air. You only need the (comparably very small) amount of stored gas to be released during freefall. Hypersonic ballutes are a mature technology, and have even been used as drag devices for manned spacecraft. Once inflated with ram air, the habitat presents a huge cross section and thus very slow descent rate.
The HAVOC proposal (which has studied the freefall inflation case in detail) used stored helium as its lifting gas (although their tankage mass estimates are very optimistic; HAVOC had a much more challenging design, in that it carries all of its ascent stage mass during atmospheric entry and made no use of ram air). More interesting than helium would be the decomposition of liquids (such as ammonia and hydrogen peroxide) and solids (such as ammonium salts), which store with low tankage masses and yield gases more desirable for a habitat (the hydrogen fraction is in particular valuable, whether (temporarily) as hydrogen gas, or as (more desirable) water). In the case of ammonia, it doesn't even need to be decomposed immediately; simply allowing it to vaporize on its own inside an envelope can provide significant lift (but decomposition doubles the number of moles of gas).
It's important to reiterate that, unlike HAVOC, the initial habitat mass is a tiny fraction of its ultimate mass. As any sustainable habitat requires ISRU, it's arriving with none of the things that ultimately make it heavy (propellant, water, and of course there's no ascent stage docked until people arrive). Hence, the initial inflation requires only a tiny percentage of the final inflation.
The mass figures for supplying the initial lofting gases are included in the linked document.
Whenever I read that, in my mind it's being said by Samuel L. Jackson in some sort of sci-fi blockbuster ;)
Incorrect again. Is it really that hard for you to read even the introduction in the above link? Venus habitation is about settlement in the middle cloud layer, not orbit.
Or for that matter, to even read the very post you're replying to? "Venus sample return mission designs use balloons to get out of the dense lower layers." Not to orbit - only out of the lower layers. A very small balloon provides a very large amount of lift in Venus's lower atmosphere. The vast majority of that "27 km/s" dV is about plowing through the lower atmosphere, which is sort of like trying to blast through water.
And to reiterate, all of this is irrelevant for a habitat lofted in the middle cloud layer.
As discussed in the above, it's incredibly difficult to actually "sink" a Venus habitat. Beyond how slowly large airships actually leak, the vast majority of the habitat's lift is dedicated to lofting the propellant on the ascent stage and (depending on the design decisions) the ascent stage itself. Meaning in the worst case you can ditch your ascent propellant (or even the ascent stage itself) and stay aloft on a tiny fraction of your peak design lift.
The easiest expansion design is via the "airworm" layout, where you have individual envelopes joined one after the next, each acting as lift cells, but containing their own propulsion, power generation, etc, and being able to function fully on their own. Even in the event of the total loss of one cell, there's no effect on the remainder.
Sorry - this discussion was about manned travel, so I assumed you were talking about manned travel as well. Further robotic probes to Titan, I'm quite the supporter of that. :) Unfortunately, Mars gets the lion's share of the unmanned exploration budget, so....
China shina gina shina.
The above link argues otherwise, in excruciating detail.
Not with aerocapture; it's actually slightly less. Venus also allows for much faster transfers, especially on return.
The requirement for an additional ascent stage is really Venus's one significant downside, but offset by numerous upsides relative to other destinations. And the very reason for that difficulty is itself a good thing: it's because Venus is so earthlike, and has the sort of gravity our bodies are adapted to.
Note also that I wouldn't use the word "land". Again, another one of the advantages of Venus is that you don't actually have to "land". There are no obstacles to avoid and your timing is much less critical; your deployment ellipse can be massive.
Nobody is talking about the surface of Venus. And even if we were, you wouldn't be using rockets plowing through the dense lower atmosphere; Venus sample return mission designs use balloons to get out of the dense lower layers.
Titan will be an interesting destination** once we can get the trip times down; it has a number of things going for it, including reasonable pressures, minimal radiation, easy local mobility, and a fascinating scientific mission (and the thermal insulation requirements are lower than most people would imagine). But until trip times can come down, it's just too far.
** Assuming that that sort of level of gravity doesn't prove to be hazardous to human health.
Actually check the link that you replying to. Nobody is talking about habitation on the surface.
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
I'm sorry, I was completely unaware that the occurence of crime is based on whether or not one is engaged in criminal activity themselves.
"Dumb as shit" is talking about being prosecuted and being a crime victim as if they're at all related to the same things.
There's been some interesting work with quantum capacitors, although it hasn't really gone anywhere. The concept is that at incredibly tiny scales, charge is quantized, and you can use this as an effective barrier to prevent dielectric breakdown. In theory, the only thing limiting the strength of your battery / capacitor is its internal tensile and compressive strengths. The unfortunate thing is that tensile and compressive strength limits are more limiting than we'd like, even if you could pull off such a quantum capacitor. In theory, you could get a good, but not "staggeringly awesome", battery with a quantum capacitor... but it's probably not worth the huge amount of research to try to bring such a thing to commercial production, if you even could.
There's also been some interesting conceptual work in storing energy in things like quantum electron traps, with electrons circling nanowires like particles in tiny particle accelerators - that one doesn't have the same sort of structural constraint problems. But that's again not gone past the conceptual stage.