Can we colonize Venus?
In the Star Wars universe, Lando Calrissian runs Cloud City, a mining colony hovering at just the right height in the clouds of a gaseous planet so that its inhabitants can walk outside without a spacesuit. Some scientists have viewed Venus in a similar way.
“At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet,” NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis wrote in
research published in 2003.
If you traveled to the cloud layers some 30 miles above Venus’ surface, you’d experience a surprisingly Earth-like temperature and a comfortable atmospheric pressure. You wouldn’t want to linger completely unprotected in Venus’ atmosphere, but it makes for a compelling settlement site for a cloud city.
In fact, other than Earth itself, Venus’ clouds are the most habitable environment in the solar system, Landis found. That’s led science fiction writers — and a few scientists — to fantasize about building a colony there.
Most ideas about how to accomplish such a feat rely on structurally reinforced blimps filled with breathable air — which floats on Venus — that would suspend platforms high above the world’s hellish surface.
One such proposal from NASA, the
High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, would use a series of missions to prove the concept is possible before ultimately dropping astronauts into Venus’ atmosphere in an inflatable airship. There, traveling at the speed of the surrounding clouds, the astronauts would put Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days to shame with a colony that circled the planet in less than a week.