NASA wants to build a floating city above the clouds of Venus

NASA thinks it might have a solution that will allow sending humans up to check it out, though: Cloud City.

The High Altitude Venus Operational Concept -- HAVOC -- is a conceptual spacecraft designed by a team at the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley Research Center for the purposes of Venusian exploration. This lighter-than-air rocket would be designed to sit above the acidic clouds for a period of around 30 days, allowing a team of astronauts to collect data about the planet's atmosphere.

"Hey Bob, wasn’t this an idea you floated a while back?"

It's one I've been thinking about for a while. Jokes abound, but Venus offers the most Earth-like conditions of any other planet in the solar system, at the appropriate altitude.

Here's the right way to think about it: Venus is like a water-world, with a globe-girdling ocean of carbon dioxide rather than water. If you float around on the surface of that "ocean", you'll enjoy remarkably Earth-like conditions. The gravity is just under Earth's. Remember that Venus is Earth's "twin".

And up at fifty kilometers altitude, you're above the sulfuric acid clouds, where the pressure and temperature are at Earth-normal values.

So how do you stay up? In a carbon dioxide atmosphere, such as Venus has, ordinary air is a lifting gas. Oxygen and nitrogen have half the lifting capacity in Venus atmosphere as helium has here.

The big advantage is that you can walk around inside your balloon component instead of just hanging in a gondola from it.

Picture a really big "jungle gym", such as we had on the elementary school playgrounds when we were kids. For extra safety, make it a double layer, and pump the space between the frames with pure nitrogen (which you get from Venus!). Then the rest of the interior has regular air, a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, eighty/twenty. The oxygen comes from plants, which take it out of the carbon dioxide. Basically, you're living inside a greenhouse!

You walk around in your greenhouse, smell the flowers, pick the fresh vegetables, and live a peaceful existence, just being wafted along in your cloud city at about 300 kilometers per hour.

At Venus' super-rotation ("Jet Stream") speed, your day will be closer to a week, so you'll have to adjust to being really off the clock. I think it would make a great retirement facility.

I can add details. I expect that dealing with wind, and maneuvering to stay in the proper part of the stream will be important.

Picture a modified Star Trek-like craft, with the “saucer section” being the living compartment, and two “ample” nacelles used for energy production and propulsion.

Three, or six, sealed chambers dip down to somewhat hotter altitudes, and then rotate up again, making a heat engine out of their slow rotation, and using the energy produced as well as their large surfaces to drive left, right, up, and down to avoid collisions and stay on course.

Of course, transporting all that mass and material from Earth to Venus would be horrendously expensive, so I propose that we build as much as possible out of locally available materials.

“Ahem, Bob,” you say, “you’re floating around in the sky of an alien planet. Where are you going to get building materials?”

Out of thin air, I say breezily. Thick air, actually. When we scavenge oxygen out of Venus atmosphere, we’re going to have leftover carbon. Now, soot buildup may be a problem on Earth, in our chimneys and such, but on Venus, it can be used to produce carbon fiber for synthetic two-by-fours, and rods, pipes, chambers, plywood, canvas, and so forth.

Anything you can make out of metal or fiberglass, you can make out of carbon fiber. And don’t forget carbon nanotubes for tension cables and such.

So what we would do is set up camp in our minimum configuration space-traveling vessel, and expand it as soon and as much as we can. Eventually we would be extending whole arms or sections out to improve our stability and controllability, and there’s no limit to how much we could expand it.

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