Catalytic Enzymes and cleaning up Venus' atmosphere?

[neutrino78x]

Ok, you still can't make steel, iron, etc. You need access to the surface for that. Teraforming already has to have fixed the atmosphere before you get to that step. Hence, Mars can be done with current technology, Venus can't.

WHY would you want steel or iron for constructing a floating habitat? That's just silly. :lol:

Well, if you can't make any new structures, really you're just going to Venus for scientific observation, in which case, one wonders why you didn't just send a robotic probe.

I want men on Mars for colonization, not scientific observation.

Not at all. They are just not practical. Machines don't use air, water, and supplies. ALL OF WHICH have to be boosted to Mars initially.

Wrong. Air and water can be derived from the Martian environment. Food can be grown there, too, in hydroponic greenhouses. That's the whole point of Mars Direct: ISRU.

1. 64.5 HOURS for a 1 meter barrel vault. In case you don't know it, that's ONLY 39 inches. Hardly a habitat.

You said it couldn't be done at all, that was fundamentally impractical. Mars Society proved it could be done. So, you were wrong.

Again, we can wait until we can build the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 before we go to Mars, in which case we will never go in the foreseeable future, or we can use current technology from this generation, and do it in the near term.

2. Portland cement and hydrated lime - Ever gone to Home Depot and picked up a few bags? If not, try it. That's a LOT of mass to "import" to Mars.

Actually, both those things can be made on Mars; read Zubrin's book.

4. I saw nothing documented that these experiments were done at Mars temperatures and pressures. If they were not, they are worthless.

They used space suits, and the same kind of equipment that would be used on Mars.

--Brian

 

[rockett]

Well, if you can't make any new structures, really you're just going to Venus for scientific observation, in which case, one wonders why you didn't just send a robotic probe.

I want men on Mars for colonization, not scientific observation.

Same for Venus, just lighter weight larger volume structures, all that's required. I actually like the cluster blimps idea proposed in an earlier post.

Wrong. Air and water can be derived from the Martian environment. Food can be grown there, too, in hydroponic greenhouses. That's the whole point of Mars Direct: ISRU.

Same for Venus floating colonies.

You said it couldn't be done at all, that was fundamentally impractical. Mars Society proved it could be done. So, you were wrong.

It is! Look at the labor involved for the resuts produced. Time and labor = supplies. In the meantime, everyone is crowded in a teensy lander.

Actually, both those things can be made on Mars; read Zubrin's book.

Soooo, we add the additional labor, to prospect, crush the rock, and so on, so "importing" them isn't needed. So how long would THAT take? Do you have any idea how cement is made? From scratch? :roll:

They used space suits, and the same kind of equipment that would be used on Mars.

Space suits are important, but not NEAR as important as what Mars temperature and pressure would do to cement. Cement cures by chemical reactions with water. Too dry or too wet, and it crumbles. The pressure and arid conditions would be almost impossible to overcome. I strongly suspect that the extreme cold would be a problem also, interferring with this reaction. If the water crystalizes before it's complete, it would probably crumble. That's what makes these so called "experiments", worthless. I will believe it when they do one in exactly the same conditions.

 

[BenS1985]

Lets not forget the cost of supplying and resupplying.

One disadvantage with Mars vs. Venus is that you *have* to ensure that you can build colonies from Martian resources simply because there is no economical way to supply material from Terran, Lunar, or other sources. Comparatively, Venus is much closer - it is about 0.3 AU closer at its semi-major axis (so it takes more resources to simply get there), but the launch window is much smaller in order to send a mission - since the Earth and Mars are closest to each other less frequently than the Earth and Venus are. Advantage, Venus.

For that same reason, any resources needed for development from Asteroids or outer planets are better off using Venus as a destination, as Venus has a higher likelihood of having a lower Delta-V than Mars would.

Expounding on that, I found some cool info on the resources required to field missions to Venus vs. Mars here:
http://discoveryenterprise.blogspot.com ... first.html

This quote was very interesting:

It will be a very long time before a human landing on Venus can be contemplated. The only realistic mission that can be done in the foreseeable future is an orbital mission. NASA studied a Venus orbital mission using Apollo technology back in 1967. Edward Willis compared a Venus orbital mission with a Mars orbital mission. The result was even the easiest Mars mission required 70% more mass then the hardest Venus mission. A Mars landing would be more difficult still.

Therefore, any delivery of payload for a Venusian mission would be much cheaper, therefore more materials/colonies could be founded for a reduction in cost. The only real advantage (and I mean the only real advantage) for Mars would be the issue of gravity. Everything else can be dealt with, even the crushing pressure and blasting heat required to be dealt with in order to acquire minerals for colonial processing.

At any rate, it'd be nice if Zurbin and all the other Marsophiles would look into Venus and try to provide a balanced, analytical look at it prior to declaring a Martian hegemony over colonization.

 

[NicknamedBob]

Lets not forget the cost of supplying and resupplying.

One disadvantage with Mars vs. Venus is that you *have* to ensure that you can build colonies from Martian resources simply because there is no economical way to supply material from Terran, Lunar, or other sources. Comparatively, Venus is much closer - it is about 0.3 AU closer at its semi-major axis (so it takes more resources to simply get there), but the launch window is much smaller in order to send a mission - since the Earth and Mars are closest to each other less frequently than the Earth and Venus are. Advantage, Venus.

For that same reason, any resources needed for development from Asteroids or outer planets are better off using Venus as a destination, as Venus has a higher likelihood of having a lower Delta-V than Mars would.

Expounding on that, I found some cool info on the resources required to field missions to Venus vs. Mars here:
http://discoveryenterprise.blogspot.com ... first.html

This quote was very interesting:

It will be a very long time before a human landing on Venus can be contemplated. The only realistic mission that can be done in the foreseeable future is an orbital mission. NASA studied a Venus orbital mission using Apollo technology back in 1967. Edward Willis compared a Venus orbital mission with a Mars orbital mission. The result was even the easiest Mars mission required 70% more mass then the hardest Venus mission. A Mars landing would be more difficult still.

Therefore, any delivery of payload for a Venusian mission would be much cheaper, therefore more materials/colonies could be founded for a reduction in cost. The only real advantage (and I mean the only real advantage) for Mars would be the issue of gravity. Everything else can be dealt with, even the crushing pressure and blasting heat required to be dealt with in order to acquire minerals for colonial processing.

At any rate, it'd be nice if Zurbin and all the other Marsophiles would look into Venus and try to provide a balanced, analytical look at it prior to declaring a Martian hegemony over colonization.

I'd like to introduce a couple of elements to this discussion that I haven't seen raised in it.

First, the concept that colonization might have to occur on either Venus or Mars is deceptive. I think a case could be made for colonizing both at the same time, and for the same reasons.

One advantage of this possibility is that resources available at one colony site might be exported to the other where they are less plentiful. An example is water ice. Early in its history, a colony on Mars may have water in plenty, available for export to Venus, before its own population should grow to require that resource.

Venus colony, even in its beginning stages, should be able to produce carbon fiber building products, available forever from the skies of Venus. The carbon is left over from extracting oxygen from the carbon dioxide atmosphere.

For that matter, any carbon dioxide that Venus colony could get up into orbit would be invaluable elsewhere, just as dirt on the moon is worth more than gold off of it.

Also, strange as it may seem, what little water is available on Venus, in various atmospheric circumstances, is highly enriched in Deuterium. During the long boiling off period of the primordial water of Venus, the heavier isotopes got left behind in a noticeable enrichment. That too will be excess, as the colonists would prefer not to drink heavy water, or produce slow children.

Once industry is operational on Mars, they should be able to export quality steel. It's entirely possible they could simply launch it with an electromagnetic launcher, ignoring the thin atmospheric resistance, and taking advantage of the slighter gravitational well.

Both locations could benefit from Rotavators, rotating pinwheel elevators that dip into and out of the thinner parts of the upper atmosphere of Venus, or possibly almost to the surface of Mars. These devices would make orbital transfers withing the inner system routine, and make such import/export operations as I described above economical. It should also be noted that Mars may be the only location in the whole Galaxy that could really benefit from a space elevator from the equator to beyond the "Geostationary" location. It's light gravity and high rotation rate make that a very feasible concept, even without really advanced materials.

I'll predict that Mars settlers will take on the personas of rugged individualist Mountain Men, braving the cold and the hardships of a harsh climate for their existence, while settlers on Venus will come to be regarded like Southerners here, enjoying the good life of a laid-back and simpler lifestyle. For them, tending to their gardens and tinkering with the Nascar factories that produce their carbon fiber and their plastic film will be the height of their technology.

Speaking of that plastic film, as I believe I am the first to do on this thread, I'd like to make the case for Ethylene Tetra-Fluoro Ethylene as that film. Similar chemically to Teflon, it has the hardy strength and chemical resistance needed to keep the lifting gas air separated from the supporting carbon dioxide of Venus' atmosphere. All of the constituent elements of ETFE are accessible in Venus' atmosphere, including Hydro-Fluoric acid, (HF).

Additionally, these "rednecks" can "go fishing" by trawling for dirt on the surface. While fifty clicks is a long line, the easy way to do it is to just parachute a contraption like a steel-jawed trap down to the surface to take a bite of it, and then inflate a balloon to bring it back up again. You'd need a radio transponder or the equivalent to find it again, but you could just laconically pick it up on your next pass around the planet.

 

[EarthlingX]

Wow Welcome to SDC, and i hope this is not your last post

 

[neutrino78x]

Lets not forget the cost of supplying and resupplying.

One disadvantage with Mars vs. Venus is that you *have* to ensure that you can build colonies from Martian resources simply because there is no economical way to supply material from Terran, Lunar, or other sources.

Not really, you could blast everything over to Mars, if you really wanted that. It just makes more sense to build locally if you intend an independent colony, which eventually becomes its own country, which is what I want on Mars. I see Mars as being like North America, and the USA being like Britain, and the first Mars colony being like Jamestown.

At any rate, it'd be nice if Zurbin and all the other Marsophiles would look into Venus and try to provide a balanced, analytical look at it prior to declaring a Martian hegemony over colonization.

Well, by all means, put some machines into the Venusian atmosphere to begin teraforming it, once we can land on Venus without the craft melting, we can go ahead and send people there.

Another issue I have with Venus is that it is closer to the Sun, and I want to expand humanity outward, away from the Sun. Venus seems like a step backward in some ways, philosophically.

--Brian

 

[neutrino78x]

Same for Venus, just lighter weight larger volume structures, all that's required. I actually like the cluster blimps idea proposed in an earlier post.

You still can't manufacture them on Venus. You can make brick on Mars, you can't make it on Venus. Not without access to the surface.

You're still looking at the NASA mission mentality, where I'm talking about a Jamestown on Mars, the ultimate goal of which is to create another country, which trades with Earth, but is not dependent on it.

Actually, both those things can be made on Mars; read Zubrin's book.

Soooo, we add the additional labor, to prospect, crush the rock, and so on, so "importing" them isn't needed.[/quote]

People would not crush rock. They would just shovel dirt into a machine, and it makes the brick. Work smarter, not harder.

And sure, if you have a nice light weight robot, like Robonaut, to do the shoveling, etc., by all means. But we shouldn't wait for that to be available before we go.

So how long would THAT take?

I guess, by your logic, we shouldn't make any homes on the Earth, because it involves a lot of physical labor.

--Brian

 

[NicknamedBob]

Wow Welcome to SDC, and i hope this is not your last post

Not likely. This is one of my favorite topics.

Living in Venusian cloud cities is a fine fantasy, but the science tinkering is good mental exercise.

 

[NicknamedBob]

Same for Venus, just lighter weight larger volume structures, all that's required. I actually like the cluster blimps idea proposed in an earlier post.

You still can't manufacture them on Venus. You can make brick on Mars, you can't make it on Venus. Not without access to the surface.

You're still looking at the NASA mission mentality, where I'm talking about a Jamestown on Mars, the ultimate goal of which is to create another country, which trades with Earth, but is not dependent on it.

--Brian

You can manufacture structures on Venus.

You need three things:
An enclosing film, to separate the breathable air from the supporting carbon dioxide:
Construction material, the equivalent of two by fours and plywood. We'd make them from carbon fiber.

And soil for the floor of the habitat, so that grass and other oxygen-producing plants can live in the habitat.

The film, (I recommend ETFE until something better can be found), can be made from atmospheric components.

The carbon fiber can also be extracted, through one process or another, from the carbon dioxide during the oxygen harvesting operation. For a low-tech source of building materials, consider growing bamboo.

So all you really need to do, occasionally, is bring in some fresh dirt, or rocks from the surface, or small freighters from orbit with lunar topsoil, or just about anything you can get your hands on.

My suggestion above, was to drop "bite-buckets" down to the surface. They'd grab a bucketful, or perhaps a couple of cubic meters, of whatever they could pry loose, and bring it back up to the top of the Venusian carbon dioxide ocean by means of a balloon. (It may help to think of Venus as a "water world", with no dry land. The high-pressure carbon dioxide is the equivalent of a globe-girdling ocean, with the people living on boats on its surface, thirty-five miles above the physical surface.)

Once you pull your retrieved "bite bucket" full of Venus topsoil in, you can start making it suitable for planting your next garden.

You could also check to see if you have materials suitable for making solar cells, which would likely be a cottage industry on Venus. Solar cells would provide the electricity for almost everything on Venus, whereas Mars will likely have to also use nuclear materials.

Once the Venus colonists learn to live off the land, and I really mean off, they'll be able to put in more gardens, more workshops, new houses, and everything else they want. They'll be metal poor, but that's an exact corollary to our own colonial existence.

 

[rockett]

You still can't manufacture them on Venus. You can make brick on Mars, you can't make it on Venus. Not without access to the surface.

You can extrude carbon fiber by breaking down CO2, I really wouldn't want an aeroshell made of brick, personally :lol:

You're still looking at the NASA mission mentality, where I'm talking about a Jamestown on Mars, the ultimate goal of which is to create another country, which trades with Earth, but is not dependent on it.

Nice dream, but any space colony, anywhere will be dependent on support from Earth for a good long while, probably generations.

People would not crush rock. They would just shovel dirt into a machine, and it makes the brick. Work smarter, not harder.

And sure, if you have a nice light weight robot, like Robonaut, to do the shoveling, etc., by all means. But we shouldn't wait for that to be available before we go..

Wait a minute! One post you say machines are not needed, that human labor is sufficient, now you are saying they are! (which means still more upmass) Are you a politician or what? You change your position at the drop of a hat just to support your (logically flawed) argument!

 

[rockett]

You can manufacture structures on Venus.

You need three things:
An enclosing film, to separate the breathable air from the supporting carbon dioxide:
Construction material, the equivalent of two by fours and plywood. We'd make them from carbon fiber.

And soil for the floor of the habitat, so that grass and other oxygen-producing plants can live in the habitat.

The film, (I recommend ETFE until something better can be found), can be made from atmospheric components.

The carbon fiber can also be extracted, through one process or another, from the carbon dioxide during the oxygen harvesting operation. For a low-tech source of building materials, consider growing bamboo.

So all you really need to do, occasionally, is bring in some fresh dirt, or rocks from the surface, or small freighters from orbit with lunar topsoil, or just about anything you can get your hands on.

My suggestion above, was to drop "bite-buckets" down to the surface. They'd grab a bucketful, or perhaps a couple of cubic meters, of whatever they could pry loose, and bring it back up to the top of the Venusian carbon dioxide ocean by means of a balloon. (It may help to think of Venus as a "water world", with no dry land. The high-pressure carbon dioxide is the equivalent of a globe-girdling ocean, with the people living on boats on its surface, thirty-five miles above the physical surface.)

Once you pull your retrieved "bite bucket" full of Venus topsoil in, you can start making it suitable for planting your next garden.

You could also check to see if you have materials suitable for making solar cells, which would likely be a cottage industry on Venus. Solar cells would provide the electricity for almost everything on Venus, whereas Mars will likely have to also use nuclear materials.

Once the Venus colonists learn to live off the land, and I really mean off, they'll be able to put in more gardens, more workshops, new houses, and everything else they want. They'll be metal poor, but that's an exact corollary to our own colonial existence.

LOVE IT! Wish I had thought of hauling soil up from the surface remotely!

 

[danhezee]

I was watching mythbusters and they were doing the myth of invisible water. They filled an aquarium full of a gas more dense than air and floated a boat in it. Since that is what a Venusian colony would be doing; I found a video. enjoy!!!

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/385694/invisible_water/

 

[NicknamedBob]

You can manufacture structures on Venus.

(Snip)

My suggestion above, was to drop "bite-buckets" down to the surface. They'd grab a bucketful, or perhaps a couple of cubic meters, of whatever they could pry loose, and bring it back up to the top of the Venusian carbon dioxide ocean by means of a balloon. (It may help to think of Venus as a "water world", with no dry land. The high-pressure carbon dioxide is the equivalent of a globe-girdling ocean, with the people living on boats on its surface, thirty-five miles above the physical surface.)

LOVE IT! Wish I had thought of hauling soil up from the surface remotely!

I was thinking about this today. The trip down to the surface, parachuting down, or descending under altitude control, takes a long time. Hopefully, certain areas will be marked as prime "fishing" territory and it may be possible to guide to them. Politeness would indicate that landing on your neighbor's equipment is bad form and counterproductive, so active control if possible would be great. Initially, I was suggesting that it could be rather primitive, but better control would make it more efficient.

Also, the trip back "up" would perhaps take even longer. That is another occasion when some kind of guidance system would be worthwhile. Hopefully, the entire down/up cycle could be timed to equal the circulation time of its home habitat. This assumes that the habitats will be freely floating in Venus' remarkable circulation system, which actually can make its way around the globe in about four days! Knowing that the day on Venus is longer than its year makes for a depressing statistic. No one wants to wait that long for sunlight.

But by being driven by those circulation winds, your day could be shortened to a week. Approximately forty hours of daylight, and forty hours of night. We're supposing our plants can adjust to it. We'll need artificial light, and daytime napping.

So hopefully, by the time you return from your wind-driven sojourn around the planet, your "bite bucket" will have bobbed up somewhere in your vicinity again, and can be retrieved as you pass.

Want to talk about your lobster-boat?

We're analogizing the thick carbon dioxide high-pressure atmosphere below you to Earth's oceans. You'd need an airplane or dirigible of some sort to move about. I'm thinking airplane. The wings and structure will be made of the same material as your house, carbon fiber tubes wrapped in ETFE and inflated with nitrogen at least. The surface of the wings will be covered with solar cells, top and bottom.

For nostalgia's sake I'm picturing a biplane, but the standards will be lax, as the speeds will be very slow.

The electricity produced, (you'll only go out in daylight, if you have any sense), will feed electric motors, operating conventional props. Such a rig could be as primitive as a SCUBA diver's tow rig.

Or, like a passenger car, it could have more advanced comforts. Air would be nice. As I mentioned, nitrogen can give you flotation, and it is a component of Venus' atmosphere. All you need is a chemical separator device to produce vast quantities.

But breathable air would be even nicer. Tanks of either compressed nitrogen or compressed breathing air, (eighty percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen), could operate an air motor which would also provide motive power (if you absolutely must go out after dark, or find yourself stranded.) The outfeed from this can be fed to the passenger compartment, at your choice of temperature (air conditioning!), for it will cool as it expands coming out of the tank.

You'll need a tank sized about ten to twenty times a gasoline engine fuel tank for somewhat comparable performance. That poor fuel economy, and a worrisome desire not to be stuck on the side of the road, prompts me to want redundancy maximized. So two means of propulsion, and a plentiful quantity of breathable air.

Now that you have a plane, or lobster boat, go get your "bite buckets" and tow them back home. You have gardening to do.

(In addition to feeding you and giving you air to breathe, those plants keep your humble dwelling afloat in the carbon dioxide atmosphere.)

 

[NicknamedBob]

For those Marsophiles who've popped up on this thread from time to time, I'd like to reiterate my wish that colonization proceed in all directions.

Mars definitely has possibilities too. That near twenty-four hour rotation, for one thing. In the familiar dome, plants would hardly know they were on a different planet.

And that dome? How about the ETFE film I was mentioning upthread? It's used in architectural "pillows" to replace standard glazing. Suppose we determine how much pressure it can withstand, and simply stack up pillow after pillow until we have a sufficient strength of layers to allow that outdoor greenhouse on Mars?

It's tough stuff, and the dirt should slide off. It is after all a cousin of Teflon.

.

When I first thought about Mars, I thought it would be a good idea to put mirrors in orbit around it to warm it up. (Aerostat mirrors supported by the pressure of sunlight, and reflecting it back upon the planet to light up all sides.)

Upon "reflection" I decided that might not be the best way to use the resources, and to get the results I wanted. I especially did not want to lose the only other natural (near) twenty-four hour rotation in the solar system.

So Plan B then. Another mirror, but placed in front of Mars.

Huh?

Lemme 'splain. You can make a lens out of an aluminum soda can. Just cut it into a thin ribbon, and arrange it around a focal point such that reflections from the shiny surface will fall on the target area. It's like a funnel for light.

Well, to warm up Mars, we put our funnel for light at the Mars-Sun L-1 point, and spread it out for a really wide area of reflection. With enough material up there, when someone on Mars looks up at the sun, instead of looking small, cold and distant, it will look large, warm and close.

Yes, an L-1 point is stable only in the axial direction. Over time, it would tend to drift either toward the sun or toward the planet. I've written a story in which an Earth L-1 radial reflector is used to direct energy away from Earth for climate control, but this one would focus energy on Mars. It would have to be guided and adjusted from time to time to remain in the proper place.

Perhaps some of that maneuvering could be done by using the pressure of sunlight, as I was considering for the aerostat mirrors. Extra capacity could be built into the mirror surface, whose purpose was only to tack with the sunlight.

Anyway, Mars needs more energy, and that would be one efficient way to get it.

Mars also needs more air and water. When possible, I'd like to send carbon dioxide from Venus, but Venus can't afford to lose more water.

Perhaps Earth could be persuaded to part with some of her richness of water, if the oceans should start to rise, and the world agrees, and a way could be found to do it. Otherwise, the outer moons and comets would appear to be the only source.

But how would you get the water down to Mars' surface?

Heh, heh. That's the fun part. Anybody wanna have a snowball fight?

See? I like Mars too.

 

[EarthlingX]

It seams to me, that both (or any) options would profit from potentially existing interplanetary logistic infrastructure. That would probably mean bases at the end-points of travel, and in-space production, utilizing material which is most easily accessible, before getting down in any of bigger gravity wells.

So what is most easy target to get to under different parameters (time, dV, required capabilities) ? I think NEOs, that's why i would start there. Phobos or Deimos are also rather cheap in dV, and still somehow interesting for space-blind flatlanders.

I'm also very much interested in what is around 60 deg behind Earth, because even a small pebble could be thousands of tons of water ice, or something else, which could be used, if there was a capability. It also looks like a potential market, when we finally start moving out.

I doubt there is a solution that would please nay-sayers, but that's not news.

 

[BenS1985]

You can manufacture structures on Venus.

(Snip)

My suggestion above, was to drop "bite-buckets" down to the surface. They'd grab a bucketful, or perhaps a couple of cubic meters, of whatever they could pry loose, and bring it back up to the top of the Venusian carbon dioxide ocean by means of a balloon. (It may help to think of Venus as a "water world", with no dry land. The high-pressure carbon dioxide is the equivalent of a globe-girdling ocean, with the people living on boats on its surface, thirty-five miles above the physical surface.)

LOVE IT! Wish I had thought of hauling soil up from the surface remotely!

I was thinking about this today. The trip down to the surface, parachuting down, or descending under altitude control, takes a long time. Hopefully, certain areas will be marked as prime "fishing" territory and it may be possible to guide to them. Politeness would indicate that landing on your neighbor's equipment is bad form and counterproductive, so active control if possible would be great. Initially, I was suggesting that it could be rather primitive, but better control would make it more efficient.

Also, the trip back "up" would perhaps take even longer. That is another occasion when some kind of guidance system would be worthwhile. Hopefully, the entire down/up cycle could be timed to equal the circulation time of its home habitat. This assumes that the habitats will be freely floating in Venus' remarkable circulation system, which actually can make its way around the globe in about four days! Knowing that the day on Venus is longer than its year makes for a depressing statistic. No one wants to wait that long for sunlight.

Humor me on my this point a bit:

I don't believe that a 'trawler' would require a significant amount of time to ferry resources from the surface to the habitat. Not if you built it properly.

The surface of Venus does indeed provide a lot of crazy challenges, but at the same time, vast opportunities.

I would imagine that a soil-gathering and mining vessel would resemble a modern fishing trawler in some ways. I believe the best sort of craft would resemble a very obese submarine. The workings of such a trawler would be similar to a sub as well. The vessel would have use ballasts for descending/rising from the surface. Helium/Hydrogen would be initially liquefied in these ballasts during launch and decent to the surface. Rudders on the trawler and a simple prop (like that of a sub) would allow it to maneuver to the mining target - although one would assume such changes would be very minimal during the decent. Since you have virtually no lifting gas in the vessel, it should descend at the optimal rate of speed - of course, some gas would be pumped into the ballasts to ensure a very safe landing to the target. This would ensure that the time taken to the surface would be minimal.

Once at the mining target, the sub would scrape the designated surface for a few tons of rock. There are a few ways you could scrape the surface - ultimately, it would be up to best practices on how best to get rock from surface. I'd imagine you would want such a task to be quick, as to ensure that the atmosphere/temperature do not effect the equipment, as prolonged time on the surface would be problematic for the durability of the crafts.

When the desired amount of soil has been scraped into the craft, the ballasts are opened, and the craft ascends. Lets not forget a very desirable trait of Venus' surface: That is that the crushing atmosphere will provide a HUGE amount of lift for the vessel. A helium filled balloon on Earth ascends at approximately 300-500ft a minute depending on various conditions. Throw in an atmosphere 90 times denser (at the surface), and you have an intense amount of lifting force from 0-25km above the surface which is where most of the challenge would lie in terms of durability for the craft. I'd imagine that the rate of ascension would be multiple times greater than that of Earths - insuring that the vessel would not need to endure the atrocious conditions of Venus' surface for more than a few minutes. That would help in terms of design, as you wouldn't have to engineer the parts to withstand the hellish conditions for a great amount of time - lets not forget that Venera 13 probe lasted on the surface for 2 hours.....That should be more than enough time to acquire needed minerals, and initiate the launch maneuver.

Once aloft, the trawler would use its rudders and propeller to slowly, but surely, navigate itself to the colony for repairs and liquefaction of the helium/hydrogen for another trip to the surface.

The goal of such a system, IMO, would be to have a fleet of such vessels constantly supplying the colony with valuable materials that cannot be obtained from the atmosphere, with a net gain of resources due to the durability and energy requirements of the trawler. Such a system would recycle nearly 100% of the craft for re-use...The only thing that would be needed would be more energy for the navigation propeller (maybe electric?), and the energy needed to liquefy the hydrogen/helium.

 

[NicknamedBob]

Humor me on my this point a bit:

I don't believe that a 'trawler' would require a significant amount of time to ferry resources from the surface to the habitat. Not if you built it properly.

The surface of Venus does indeed provide a lot of crazy challenges, but at the same time, vast opportunities.

I would imagine that a soil-gathering and mining vessel would resemble a modern fishing trawler in some ways. I believe the best sort of craft would resemble a very obese submarine.

No doubt some unforeseen engineering will go into these designs once people arrive on the scene. I was initially going for one of the simplest configurations, and then subsequently realized that there is a physical constraint that would tend to focus designs on certain conditions.

Your descriptions makes it sound as though the habitat proper will be lingering overhead while the trawler descends, extracts material, and climbs back up to altitude. You must think more dynamically. The overhead habitat will be breezing along with three hundred mile per hour circulatory winds. After the trawler begins its descent, it will be subject to more and more slowly moving winds in the thicker atmosphere near the surface. The same for coming back to altitude.

Logic suggests that the descending vehicle not be attached in any way, but freely moving. And that the descent, loading, and return time coincide with the time it takes for the habitat to go around the planet once, or possibly twice.

That puts the trawler popping up again when the wind has brought the habitat back into range. And that means that some devices will need to be operational to help each find the other. Electronics being a chancy operation in Venus' really thick soup, it's possible that the signal device on the trawler or bite-bucket may be nothing more than a radar corner-reflecter.

But one point I wanted to establish beyond doubt is that Venus' atmosphere is a huge volume, capable of supporting millions of floating habitats in comfort, and I might hope, style. Finding those bite-buckets may be difficult, but they will be worth retrieving, for therein lies the resources for making energy out of the abundant sunshine, and giving soil to the many gardens required to "keep up" the population.

Additionally, using helium or hydrogen is dangerous and expensive overkill, when even water is a lifting gas at the surface. I recommend nitrogen, easily available from the atmosphere. All of the airlocks on all of the habitats will using nirogen purging to eliminate the Venus air when workers return from outside, and then that will be replaced or balanced with either oxygen or regular air.

I have predicted elsewhere that nitrogen containers will be as ubiquitous in Venus habitats as fire extinguishers are here. They'll be useful for emergency flotation in the event of a tear in the habitat envelope. Also plentiful will be air bottles for people who need to work outside the envelope. Since these are lifting gases in Venus' atmosphere, why bother with rare and valuable exotics like helium?

 

[BenS1985]

I didn't mention helium exclusively, Bob. I merely said hydrogen/helium, as both would have incredible lifting power. Hydrogen can be produced from the sulfuric acid in the clouds via reaction with metal, which produces the gas + metal sulfate.

That would be an easy way to create a powerful lifting gas

I understand that the colony would quickly move away from the trawler due to the discrepancy in wind speeds between the surface and the cloud cover. That is why I suggested a simple propeller to maneuver the craft into the colony once soil has been acquired, and its ready for re-insertion to the colony. Furthermore, you could always have a group of craft that find and return the trawlers to the colony...You could even simplify the trawlers to become more akin to crab baskets which simply drop down to the surface, pick up material, and pop back up into the atmosphere to be collected by a cloud-skimming ship which would collect the soil, and repair the buckets for returning to the surface for another trip.

 

[Couerl]

Funny stuff! Whaddya need a trawler for if your whole habitat is one big floating thingy to begin with? :geek:

 

[danhezee]

Funny stuff! Whaddya need a trawler for if your whole habitat is one big floating thingy to begin with? :geek:

ISRU

 

[Couerl]

Funny stuff! Whaddya need a trawler for if your whole habitat is one big floating thingy to begin with? :geek:

ISRU

Well ya, but the sound of it (the "trawler" with propellers etc..) makes it seem as if they'd need separate ships/barges to go floating around in and digging up all that great dirt with a bucket. Why all that when the whole "colony" is mobile and can go wherever it wants? I'm thinking more along the lines of a large ocean going oil rig as far as habitats go..

 

[danhezee]

Well ya, but the sound of it (the "trawler" with propellers etc..) makes it seem as if they'd need separate ships/barges to go floating around in and digging up all that great dirt with a bucket. Why all that when the whole "colony" is mobile and can go wherever it wants? I'm thinking more along the lines of a large ocean going oil rig as far as habitats go..

I get what you are saying, now. At first, having separate ships for trawling would be useless and inefficient. Since the colony itself would be the size of a ship. But, after a certain size ,lets say a few acres of floating colony, more nimble ships would be essential for trawling operations.

 

[BenS1985]

Well ya, but the sound of it (the "trawler" with propellers etc..) makes it seem as if they'd need separate ships/barges to go floating around in and digging up all that great dirt with a bucket. Why all that when the whole "colony" is mobile and can go wherever it wants? I'm thinking more along the lines of a large ocean going oil rig as far as habitats go..

I get what you are saying, now. At first, having separate ships for trawling would be useless and inefficient. Since the colony itself would be the size of a ship. But, after a certain size ,lets say a few acres of floating colony, more nimble ships would be essential for trawling operations.

Lets not forget that the size of the trawlers would be in direct relation to the size of the colony. You may only need trawlers the size of a small car to provide a proof of concept during the beginning stages of a colony...Slowly expanding their size and the size of the fleet as the colony grows larger.

My main issue with the colony module also obtaining resources is that it would require a great deal more weight to add any sort of system that could descend 50km to the surface to obtain minerals.

 

[NicknamedBob]

Well ya, but the sound of it (the "trawler" with propellers etc..) makes it seem as if they'd need separate ships/barges to go floating around in and digging up all that great dirt with a bucket. Why all that when the whole "colony" is mobile and can go wherever it wants? I'm thinking more along the lines of a large ocean going oil rig as far as habitats go..

I get what you are saying, now. At first, having separate ships for trawling would be useless and inefficient. Since the colony itself would be the size of a ship. But, after a certain size ,lets say a few acres of floating colony, more nimble ships would be essential for trawling operations.

Lets not forget that the size of the trawlers would be in direct relation to the size of the colony. You may only need trawlers the size of a small car to provide a proof of concept during the beginning stages of a colony...Slowly expanding their size and the size of the fleet as the colony grows larger.

My main issue with the colony module also obtaining resources is that it would require a great deal more weight to add any sort of system that could descend 50km to the surface to obtain minerals.

I think we're all showing a greater understanding and appreciation for the physical problems involved, but let's recoup for just a moment.

Venus has an incredibly slow rotation rate. In fact, a day on the surface will last longer than a year. The rotation requires 243 Earth days, while the revolution around the sun takes only 224.7! This results in the curious situation that Venus in effect rotates backward, with the sun rising slowly in the west, and sinking slowly in the east.

For this reason, a human habitat on Venus would be as alien to our time perception as a lengthy sojourn in Antarctica, where the day is six months long.

Fortunately, the area of interest for human habitation is not locked to the very slow surface rotation rate. Instead, we are looking at floating freely with the rapid circulatory winds of Venus, some of which can jet around the planet in only four days!

Think about a planet with a slow rotation. Energy feeding into its dayside atmosphere will want to migrate to the darker side, presumably to condense. This is what happens on Venus, although the heat content is so high, and the atmosphere is so dense, that the substantial heat absorbed from the sunlight is rapidly distributed very evenly across the whole planet.

That "dark side" of Venus doesn't get any cooler.

The jet streams of Venus are a permanent fixture, like mighty rivers on Earth. And they are driven by the same basic process, fluids responding to differences in temperature. Venus may not be as tectonically active as we might have suspected or wished, but its atmosphere is a boiling cauldron.

So this means that our habitat, while drifting along with the breeze, is drifting along at an appreciable pace. I'd imagine it would be like riding Huck Finn's raft down the Mississippi. You'd be moving, but everything around you would be moving too, and your motion would hardly be apparent.

Now, that established, clearly there is a difference between going around the planet in four days, and doing some excavation work at a place that takes more than two hundred days to return to the same location. Once our dredge equipment, "bite bucket", or trawler drops down into lower, slower atmosphere, it's going to fall behind at a rapid pace.

And there won't be any purpose to trying to make that ungainly craft attempt to match our jet speed. We'll be back in a few days, just chill. Er, so to speak.

The dirt and minerals dredged up from the surface will provide the raw material for making solar cells, which will be a necessity for anyone who wants to use electricity. But they will also provide a base for the gardens required as well. Plants do need occasional mineral nutrients, and so do humans.

Then there are the valuable metals and metal ores. Our machines will need them. You can make a lot of stuff with carbon fiber, but some parts may require metal. Keep in mind that every habitat is going to want an air pump, and whatever configuration of a nitrogen separator they can cobble up. (This is a chemical separator to extract nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. Its chemicals are recycled for the next operation, and nitrogen will be the primary lifting gas for all structures and habitats. The oxygen will in all likelihood, come mainly from green growing plants. They have the ability, remember, to convert carbon dioxide into cellulose and oxygen!)

Then, too, Venus will need industry. There will be a need for radios and radars, light bulbs and garden rakes, spoons and steampots, and for toothbrushes and toothpaste. Venus will also need an industrious chemical manufacturing capability, as every home or business will need a good barrier between the poisonous and corrosive atmosphere outside, and the beneficent and supportive atmosphere inside.

 

[neilsox]

Some, perhaps many, rather minor technical advances allow habitats near the top of the atmosphere of Venus where more solar energy is available than on Earth's surface. At an altitude of 35 miles = 50 kilometers, however, I suspect the light level is less than on the surface of Mars, and the air pressure unhealthy for humans. Also there is much less sulphuric acid and cooler temperatures at perhaps 80 kilometers. Somewhat higher, however, is likely OK for habitats. CNT = carbon nano tubes, with great specs can easily lift surface material to the habitats, but top soil is over optimistic. Silicon dioxide is likely the main ingredient of random snatches. Several round trips per earth day is likely realistic, but the bucket will behave like a sea anchor, causing our habitat to move slower than the wind speed at that altitude. Recovering the bucket 4 days later, makes the system much more complicated, but perhaps better.The submarine suggestion may be workable, but I don't think liquid hydrogen or helium will be used as you think. If 10 cubic meters of "air" at the surface of Venus weighs twenty tons, a 19.9 ton submarine will drop like a rock at 80 kilometers altitude, but have neutral buoyancy at the surface. The sub will compress to slightly smaller volume due to the 90 atmospheres of "air" pressure. The very high air resistance will slow the craft to make a gentle landing at the surface, but the outside of the sub may heat to 700 degrees c. True we need to dump a bit more than a ton of ballast for each ton of dirt to lift off, or alternately increase the volume of the submarine against the 90 atmospheres of pressure, 500 degrees c. I don't know of any material that can stretch enough under those conditions, but boiling liquid hydrogen (I see no good reason to use helium) can easily provide the the 90 plus atmospheres of pressure. We start with perhaps 1/2 ton of hydrogen slush (contains some frozen hydrogen), near vacuum in the sub. The internal pressure rises (evaporation of the slush) to partially offset the increasing outside pressure as the sub descends. At the surface, the doors open on the side buried in the dust (if Venus has significant dust) The pressure outside pushes the dust into the sub. The doors close and seal. The hydrogen evaporates = boils making the inside pressure higher than the outside pressure, which expands the sub to about 14 cubic meters. I can't imagine what material makes that possible as the temperature will likely reach 600 degrees c. We will likely have to vent some of the hydrogen during the ascent to avoid bursting the sub as the outside pressure decreases. Another possibility is allowing the sub volume to increase to about 20 cubic meters as it ascends, but I know of no material that permits this at 400 degrees c and about a hundred atmospheres pressure.
At Epcot, Disney World, Florida, successful hydroponics have produced perhaps 100 tons of food over the last 20 years, so we can produce food and oxygen, by photosynthesis without soil.The material from the surface will however be useful for fertilizer etc.
I suspect the habitats will be far from self sufficient, and malfunctions are more likely to prove fatal to the humans than ships on Earth's oceans. The cost will be hard to justify, even long term. Neil