From the very beginning of the space age of mankind, the interest of many scientists, researchers and designers was riveted to Venus. The planet with a beautiful female name, which in Roman mythology belonged to the goddess of love and beauty, attracted scientists because it was the closest planet to the Earth in the solar system. In many of its characteristics (size and mass) Venus is close to the Earth, for which it is even called the "sister" of our planet. Venus, like Mars, is also referred to as the terrestrial planets. The Soviet Union achieved the greatest success in the exploration of Venus in its time: the first spacecraft to Venus were sent already in 1961, and a large-scale research program continued until the mid-1980s.
Very often on the Internet you can find materials that relate to the Soviet program of exploration or even the colonization of Venus. It should be noted that such programs have never been seriously considered, adopted or implemented in practice. At the same time, pseudo-scientific articles and materials that dealt with the exploration of Venus and the possibility of its use by humans did appear. Today, on the official website of the Roskosmos television studio, you can find an interview with design engineer Sergei Krasnoselsky, which tells about projects for the exploration of Venus. This question has always interested scientists, engineers, designers and just people who are fond of space, but from a theoretical point of view. The practical side of Soviet cosmonautics was directed towards the exploration of Venus. And in this matter, the USSR has achieved outstanding success. The number and scale of research carried out and satellites and space stations sent to Venus led to the fact that the world of cosmonautics began to call Venus the "Russian planet".
What do we know about Venus
Venus is the third brightest object in the earth's sky after the Sun and the Moon; you can observe the planet in good weather even without a telescope. In terms of its brightness, the planet of the solar system closest to the Earth is significantly superior to even the brightest stars, and Venus can also be easily distinguished from stars by its even white color. Due to its location relative to the Sun, Venus can be observed from Earth either some time after sunset or before sunrise, so the culture has two clear definitions for the planet: "evening star" and "morning star".
Observing Venus is available to the average man in the street, but scientists, of course, are not attracted by this. Being the closest planet to the Earth (the distance to Venus at different times ranges from 38 to 261 million kilometers, for comparison, the distance to Mars is from 55, 76 to 401 million kilometers), Venus also belongs to the terrestrial planets, along with Mercury and Mars. It is not by chance that Venus was nicknamed "the sister of the Earth", in terms of its size and mass: mass - 0.815 terrestrial, volume - 0.857 terrestrial, it is very close to our home planet.
In the foreseeable future, only two planets of the solar system can be considered as possible objects of colonization: Venus and Mars. And given the accumulated amount of knowledge on Venus, which was obtained, including thanks to domestic cosmonautics, there is only one obvious option - Mars. Venus, despite its similarity to Earth in mass and size, proximity to our planet and large surface area, since Venus has no oceans, the planet is very unfriendly. Venus receives twice as much energy from the Sun as the Earth. On the one hand, this could be an advantage, allowing to solve many problems at the expense of energy of natural origin, but, on the other hand, this is also the main problem. The advantages of Venus end quickly enough, but the disadvantages of the "morning star" are much more, it is simply impossible for a person to live and exist on the surface of Venus. The only option is to master the atmosphere of Venus, but it is very difficult to implement such a project in practice.
For a person, the conditions of being on Venus are not just uncomfortable, they are intolerable. So the temperature on the surface of the planet can reach 475 degrees Celsius, which is higher than the temperature on the surface of Mercury, located two times closer to the Sun than Venus. It is for this reason that the "morning star" is the hottest planet in our solar system. At the same time, temperature drops during the day are insignificant. Such a high temperature on the planet's surface is due to the greenhouse effect, which is created by the atmosphere of Venus, 96.5 percent consisting of carbon dioxide. The pressure on the planet's surface, which is 93 times higher than the pressure on Earth, will not please a person. This corresponds to the pressure that is observed in the oceans on Earth when submerged to a depth of about one kilometer.
Soviet Venus Exploration Program
The USSR began studying Venus even before Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space. On February 12, 1961, the Venera-1 spacecraft departed from the Baikonur cosmodrome to the second planet of the solar system. The Soviet automatic interplanetary station flew 100 thousand kilometers from Venus, managing to enter its heliocentric orbit. True, radio communication with the Venera-1 station was lost earlier, when it moved away from the Earth by about three million kilometers, the cause was a hardware failure on board the station. Lessons were learned from this case, the information obtained was useful in the design of the following spacecraft. And the Venera-1 station itself became the first spacecraft to fly close to Venus.
Over the next 20-plus years, the Soviet Union sent several dozen spacecraft for various purposes to Venus, some of them successfully completed scientific missions in the vicinity and on the very surface of the planet. At the same time, the process of studying Venus by Soviet scientists was complicated by the fact that the researchers simply did not then have data on the pressure and temperature on the second planet from the Sun.
The launch of "Venera-1" was followed by a series of unsuccessful launches, which were interrupted by the launch of the automatic interplanetary station "Venera-3" in November 1965, which was finally able to reach the surface of the second planet of the solar system, becoming the first spacecraft in world history, which got to another planet. The station was unable to transmit data about Venus itself, even before landing on the AMS, the control system failed, but thanks to this launch, valuable scientific information about outer space and near-planetary space was obtained, as well as a large array of trajectory data was accumulated. The information obtained was useful for improving the quality of ultra-long-range communications and future flights between the planets of the solar system.
The next Soviet space station, called "Venus-4", allowed scientists to obtain the first data on the density, pressure and temperature of Venus, while the whole world learned that the atmosphere of the "morning star" is more than 90 percent carbon dioxide. Another important event in the history of Venus exploration was the launch of the Soviet Venera-7 spacecraft. On December 15, 1970, the first ever soft landing of a spacecraft on the surface of Venus took place. Station "Venera-7" forever entered the history of astronautics, as the first fully operational spacecraft, successfully landed on another planet in the solar system. In 1975, the Soviet spacecraft Venera-9 and Venera-10 allowed scientists to obtain the first panoramic images from the surface of the planet under study, and in 1982, the landing craft of the Venera-13 station, assembled by the designers of the Lavochkin Scientific and Production Association, sent back to Earth the first ever color photographs of Venus from its landing site.
According to Roskosmos, from 1961 to 1983, the Soviet Union sent 16 automatic interplanetary stations to Venus; morning star "two new Soviet vehicles, called" Vega-1 "and" Vega-2 ", went.
Flying Islands of Venus
According to experts, the only option for human exploration of Venus is life in its atmosphere, and not on the surface. Back in the early 1970s, Soviet engineer Sergei Viktorovich Zhitomirsky published an article titled "The Flying Islands of Venus." The article appeared in the 9th issue of the magazine "Technics for Youth" in 1971. A person can live on Venus, but only in the atmosphere at an altitude of about 50-60 kilometers, using balloons or airships for this. It is extremely difficult to implement this project, but the development mechanism itself is clear. If a person managed to gain a foothold in the atmosphere of Venus, the next step would be to change it. Venus itself is better than Mars also by the fact that the atmosphere on the planet really exists, the fact that it is not suitable for life and colonization is another question. In theory, humanity could direct efforts to reshape the atmosphere of Venus using accumulated knowledge and technology.
One of the first to propose the idea of exploring and colonizing the clouds and atmosphere of Venus was a scientist from the American Space Agency and science fiction writer Jeffrey Landis. He also noticed that the surface of the planet is too unfriendly for colonists, and the pressure on the surface is simply monstrous and far from the pressure in one earth's atmosphere, at the same time Venus still remains a terrestrial planet, much like Earth and with practically the same acceleration of the free falling. But for humans, Venus becomes friendly only at an altitude of more than 50 kilometers above the surface. At this altitude, a person is faced with air pressure that is comparable to that of the earth and approaches the same atmosphere. At the same time, the atmosphere itself is still dense enough to protect potential colonists from harmful radiation, performing the same role of a protective shield as the Earth's atmosphere. At the same time, the temperature also becomes more comfortable, dropping to 60 degrees Celsius, it is still hot, but humanity and the available technologies allow us to cope with such a temperature. At the same time, if you rise several kilometers higher, the temperature will become even more comfortable, reaching 25-30 degrees, and the atmosphere itself will continue to protect people from radiation. The pluses of Venus also include the fact that the gravity of the planet is comparable to that of the earth, so the colonists could live in the clouds of Venus for years without any special consequences for their body: their muscles would not weaken, and their bones would not become fragile.
The Soviet engineer Sergei Zhitomirsky, who was hardly familiar with the point of view of his American colleague, adhered to about the same point of view. He also spoke about the possibility of deploying a permanent scientific base precisely in the atmosphere of Venus at an altitude of more than 50 kilometers. According to his plans, it could be either a large balloon or, even better, an airship. Zhitomirsky proposed to make the shell of the airship from thin corrugated metal. According to his plans, this would make the shell rather rigid, but retain the ability to change the volume. In the atmosphere of the "morning star", the base was supposed to cruise at a given altitude along predetermined trajectories, moving above the planet's surface and, if necessary, hovering in the sky over certain points of interest to researchers.
The Soviet engineer thought about how to fill the shells of aircraft for the Venus sky. According to his idea, there was no point in bringing helium, traditional for this purpose, from Earth. Although the dead weight of helium would be about 9 percent of the mass of the balloons, the cylinders in which it would be necessary to transport gas to the planet at a pressure of 300-350 atmospheres would pull as much as the entire aircraft would weigh. Therefore, Sergei Zhitomirsky suggested taking ammonia in low pressure cylinders or ordinary water from the Earth, which would help to significantly reduce the weight of the delivered goods. Already on Venus, under the pressure of the planet's high temperatures, these liquids themselves would turn into steam (without any energy consumption), which would serve as a working medium for the balloon.
In any case, neither in the 1970s, nor now is the Venus exploration program a priority for the development of world cosmonautics. Colonization of other planets is a very expensive pleasure, especially when it comes to such an unfavorable environment for human life, which is observed today on the surface of the "morning star". So far, all the eyes of mankind are riveted on Mars, which, although it is further away and does not have its own atmosphere, still seems to be a much more friendly planet. Especially if we consider the option of building a scientific base on the Martian surface.
