On Sep/17/2020 at 07:29, Jeff Findley wrote :
In article ,
says...

On Wednesday, September 16, 2020 at 5:12:09 PM UTC-4, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

They would need to have another airship nearby and a way to quickly move all
the people to that airship.

That's a possibility, but not what I was thinking.

Or have a rocket with enough passenger capacity to go to orbit.

This is what I was thinking. Since the crew likely doesn't want to say
in the atmosphere of Venus forever, they presumably already have a
launch vehicle which will get them from the airship back to Venus orbit.
That would double as an escape vehicle.

It would depend on the crew size. If it was 5 or 6 people they could have such
a vehicle on hand.

If the crew was 25 or 30 or 50 or more that was built up over time, that might
take 5 or 10 separate trips to evacuate all of them. They might not have
enough time to evacuate all.

You'd certainly want enough vehicles on hand to get all the crew out at
the same time. For example, ISS always has enough vehicles docked that
the entire crew can evacuate, if need be.

As for crew size, I really can't imagine a Venus expedition with more
than 5 or 6 people happening in the next several decades.

First we'd want to test uncrewed atmospheric vehicles. Then we'd slowly
work our way up to something big enough to support a crew. That's going
to take time, especially when you consider how long it takes to get to
Venus and back.

All my opinion, of course. If the likes of Starship works out, that
changes the lift capacity equation dramatically. With costs dropping
and payload size increasing, that would be a boon to any Venus
exploration initiative.

And on Jul/4/2020 at 18:29 wrote:
| Workable? Or just another flight of fancy?
|
| "This airship flies from the upper atmospheric station to orbit. It |
| uses hybrid chemical/electric propulsion to slowly accelerate and | |
| reach orbit.
|
| "A two mile wide station parked at 140,000 feet is the new way station
| to space. The station acts not only as a port for the orbital | | |
| airship but also as a research center, construction site and tourist |
| destination."
|
| See:
|
| http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf
|
| &
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32082/we-talk-giant-boomerang-|
| shaped-airships-space-and-phoenix-lights-with-jp-aerospaces-founder

At the time, I expressed my scepticism about those balloons to space,
and I still am sceptic. But if they do manage to make them work, for
Earth, there really is no reason why they couldn't do it for Venus. They
would just skip the leg going from the ground to their high altitude
balloon station. In fact, I'm not sure if the high altitude station is
needed at all. They could just fly the balloon between orbit and high
altitude atmosphere.

If they can prove the existence of life in Venus' atmosphere, and prove
that it has an independent origin from life on Earth (not a panspermia
thing); I would consider that to be one of the most important scientific
discovery, if not the most important scientific discovery, ever. But I
think that some weird chemistry is more likely to be the cause here.
Though I am hoping for life.


Alain Fournier