How cool is VL2

Part - 2

Life at VL2's POOF city is offering somewhat tenuous odds, as rather
dependent upon how much shield is doing how much good, and of the
naked physical truth of having to avoid whatever is passing nearby or
through your POOF that has your name on it. Otherwise this POOF city
should be nearly as safe as ISS, although without benefit of a
magnetosphere as shield from those waves of solar wind that's
continually blowing the upper atmospheric stuff of Venus your way, is
perhaps a bit more of an unknown.

The to/from commute is by itself another potentially testy what-if, or
at best a somewhat iffy consideration, that's likely worth a good 6
months that'll add to your time and unavoidable TBI in space, along
with the 16~18 months spent at VL2. I'm not sure if banked bone
marrow will be sufficient, but I certainly would not bother going
without taking along a well isolated N2 frozen soild cache of my own
bone marrow.

Two years worth of serious BO and other unavoidable considerations may
be asking a bit much from most of us. Possibly at best that amount of
time spent off-world can be cut down to 21 months, though don't count
on it, as if anything it's more than likely going to take a combined
30+ months, and that's if nothing goes terribly wrong. Still all and
all, VL2 being within 100 fold the distance of our moon each and every
19 months isn't imposing 5% of what doing Mars is all about.

We can even utilize our gamma and hard-Xray shedding moon itself as a
gravity boosted exit phace in getting to VL2, and upon our return we
should be able once again to utilize that pesky mascon of a moon as
our gravity parking brake. Because the moon only has that thin sodium
and argon atmosphere to deal with, as such the near miss passage for
achieving the best gravity affect can be safely taken to within a few
km off that moon's physically dark and nasty surface.

As for accomplishing Venus itself is not worth hardly 10% of doing
Mars, as well as representing an absolute win-win for those planning
upon staying for the remainder of their life, as for the notions of
ever returning from any such other world or spore and virus infested
moon is actually not such a good option, that is unless losing a few
hundred million folks upon Earth from whatever can easily infect our
frail environment and otherwise traumatise our poorly engineered DNA
(that'll have not a clue as to how to go about protecting ourselves
from whatever weird little forms of such ET micro life), as for such a
biological what-if being a potentially moral and/or ethical problem,
especially if it were derived from whatever was robust enough for
having been associated with that other planet or moon, shouldn't be
excluded from this or any other argument.

Too bad we don't have those station keeping robust habitats at our
moon's L1 for safely accommodating such crew and passengers returning
from whatever other worlds or moons, or better yet of there being
something deep underground upon our salty moon would become nearly the
ideal biological isolation, offering the ultimate solution that's
close enough to home to suit for all but physical contact.
-
Brad Guth