GoKawiilOne reason an expedition to Mars is forever two decades away is because of the leap in difficulty between landing to the Moon and going to Mars.
There’s not a big difference in energy between the two destinations. Any rocket that can land on the moon can easily put a crew in Martian orbit. The issue is time.
As we saw recently with Artemis II, a spaceship can get human cargo to the Moon and back in about ten days. But orbital mechanics makes it hard to complete a trip to Mars in less than two years, and rigid launch windows further constrain options for abort or rescue. Bridging the gap between the two weeks we’ve spent on the Moon and the long, committal journey we’d have to make to Mars runs us into a thicket of difficulties.
In other words, the ladder to the stars is missing some rungs.
It would be nice if there was a class of mission intermediate in difficulty between the Moon and Mars, one that didn’t take us so far out of our experience base and had better abort options than ‘press the red button and wait two years’. Even better if the mission had a milder radiation environment, shorter communications delay, and a high potential for scientific discovery.
This class of mission exists, but no one likes to talk about it:
An orbital trip to Venus is like one of those gorgeous high-rise apartments in Jersey City. Everything about it is perfect except the location.
And I understand the reluctance! Venus is the biggest heartbreak in the Solar System. The planet could have been Earth’s twin, but instead became an acid-washed nightmare and climatological horror story. People have never recovered from the big reveal in the early Space Age that the clouds enveloping our beautiful planetary neighbor covered a hell world.
But with Venus, you have to adopt a ‘glass half full’ approach, even if the thing the glass is half full of is concentrated sulfuric acid.
To get the bad stuff out of the way, the surface temperature on Venus is around 470°C, about as hot as a pizza oven, and the pressure is 92 times what we enjoy here on Earth. The high cloud layers, while temperate, are mostly sulfuric acid. And because volcanic activity has reworked the planet’s surface within the last billion years, there is little hope of finding Mars-like relics of the planet’s habitable past, even if we could build the rovers to look for them. If young Venus had temperate oceans or harbored life, the evidence for it has been buried about as thoroughly as anything in this solar system can be buried.
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