The US still hasn’t landed on Venus and probably never will
Not much to gain by going there. Wildly corrosive, too hot, too hard to terraform with present tech.
Terraforming isn’t on the table anywhere. We can’t even stop fucking up this planet, let alone unfuck it, let alone apply much more advanced unfucking tech on planets without any of the environmental cycles we take for granted.
Space programs do science stuff and military stuff. Revisiting Venus would be for science stuff.
Space programs definitely do science and stuff. All I meant to say was that Venus might not be the lowest hanging fruit for scientific discovery.
It’s really expensive to go there. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
I see now how my post could read as an elon-fanboi type “colonize all the things” and that was not what I intended.
I do think Atmospheric sensor clusters on Venus would be pretty awesome. It could give us an interesting set of insights into a wildly different environment.
At 50km high it is literally the most Earth-like environment in the whole of the solar system (outside of Earth / the ISS / Tiāngōng obviously)
You wouldn’t even need a spacesuit or a pressure suit to stand outside, just a respirator and some light protection against acid
Maybe we should try terraforming earth before we start to look elsewhere idk.
