NASA's plan for a floating city above Venus

500 millibars just might do it. The livestock would be a good idea, too. They fart a lot. A cheap, efficient soda lime rebreathing unit would probably be all it took to move about the local environment. All you have to do is heat the soda lime and it's good to go again. I'm thinking this is doable.

Oh yeah, i agree completely. There would be abundant solar power, and you could have unmanned craft land fissionable material for small nuke reactors to generate large amounts of entery. The biggest job would be to get nitrogen from Titan.

Alrighty, after a quick Googling, I can see that it would be a big gamble to try to find enough nitrogen locked in the minerals known to Mars to support a colony. Getting it from Titan is the next best solution, but ****. The technological/engineering hurdles.

Space elevator... You could literally anchor one, attach a giant hose, and suck it right out of the atmosphere by an orbiting tanker. And I do believe Titan's gravity a far less than Earth's, and thus making the elevator concept far more feasible

"No one" is certainly false, although it's clear that Congress is composed of people who are incapable of long term thinking.

Profitably mining gases from the gas giants is so far beyond our capability that right now is simply not the time to spend money on it. We can barely get people to commit to a return to the Moon. We need to crawl before we can walk.

I just read that the wind speed in the middle cloud layer of Venus's atmosphere can reach 450 miles an hour (724 kph). Not sure what it's be in the upper layers, but if it's anywhere near that...big problem.

Either I missed it, or the article I first cited here did not mention, the floating city over Venus would be in use just thirty days.

EB, i believe people were responding to this comment.

I just read a different link a few minutes back, which mentioned the thirty day time limit.

Your original post said something to the effect of "about a month." I think that people were responding to the portion of the article which i quoted above.

Okay. I just forgot. I understand that you all were discussing the other matter.

Thirty days is not a lot of time to get a lot of science done. And with Venus's unique conditions, I'm not sure how much it could contribute to future missions to other planets. Hmm. I was enthusiastic at first, but now I'm thinking maybe the money might be better allocated elsewhere.

This is a great ... um ... day dream but not much else. When NASA dreams big like this yet comes out with this:

It's never going to get funded. It's NEVER going to happen.

When there's a project that has no near-future timeline then I wouldn't place any hopes it will ever seriously move beyond wishful thinking/concept phase.

Name for the town? NEW ZEPPOLINA, of course.

NASA's massive social media advertising campaign has coincided with the recent Orion test launch. All the tall claims made by the US space agency have been disapproved of by many renowned veteran NASA aerospace engineers.

They believe that the Orion spacecraft and the rocket which NASA calls the Space Launch System (SLS) are not the deep space transportation system of tomorrow. Also, if both these projects are allowed to continue too long then it will give America's international rivals time to erode away the still considerable technological lead in space technology that the US now enjoys.

These renowned veterans pointed out that SLS has especially increased our dependence on Russia for astronaut rides to the International Space Station. Some private companies have developed space exploration technologies for space missions in the recent years.



They have also claimed that the more times both these two technologically outmoded projects are allowed to flourish, the more they will potentially deny the nation's future economic and strategic advantages that leadership in human spaceflight has the potential to provide.

Despite all these warnings, there is no major push by reporters to highlight the scandal to the general public that will provide them a short-sighted action of what the politicians and bureaucrats are responsible for in this respect.

Many members of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) have been openly expressing their views. Marcia S. Smith stated in an article for Space Policy Online quoted NAC sitting member Tom Young, who is former Director of NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center, giving a blunt opinion of the inadequacy of NASA's roadmap for such manned deep space expeditions in these words, "We are collectively perpetrating a fraud".

- See more at: http://perfscience.com/content/214963-nasa-being-exempted-critical-investigation-major-news-media#sthash.boqqbZNU.dpuf

Strong stuff . . . thanks, EB.

so were back to shallow orbit construction of deep space probes and lift systems. Did we totally discount the elevator ? As I recll. Billy was dead set against this for personal reasons of wanting "Nuclear rockets" and that's bout where we left it.

Im still unconvinced bout any shortcomings of the elevator going into space to an orbital assembly area for ion propulsion engines.

The ion propulsion idea is a time whose idea has come, and is enjoying a cigarette. The Dawn mission, now nearly a decade old, sent a probe to Vesta, now considered the largest "asteroid" (because Ceres is now called a dwarf planet)--and will reach Ceres early this hear.

This is NASA's equipment page for the Dawn Mission.

Here's the home page for NASA's Dawn mission.

As i recall, Bill had a single source saying that a space elevator was impractical. After someone (you?) pointed out that he was quoting to only prominent critic of the idea, as i recall, he dropped out of the discussion.

HEADS UP: very long interesting piece on american manned flight in the current issue of Atlantic. I learned a lot about what it is like to live in space for an extended time, and came away thinking that we are not ready at all to attempt to go to mars. Not only might the humans not be physically fit enough to work on Mars, but they might be going blind too. Things we might want to nail down before we start spending money on the scheme.