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Comment by ValleyOfTheMtns | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Venus is under-appreciated as a colonisation target, but I haven't seen anyone attempt to address the issue of how you "land" in the atmosphere without touching down on the surface? And if you ever want to get back to Earth, how do you launch a rocket within the atmosphere? These are non-trivial engineering problems that need to be addressed.

First things first, lets get a probe floating around in the clouds of Venus.

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> I haven't seen anyone attempt to address the issue of how you "land" in the atmosphere without touching down on the surface?

Spacecraft in the Venera program successfully deployed balloons following atmospheric entry, see [1]. The balloons stayed up in the atmosphere for more than 46 hours.

> how do you launch a rocket within the atmosphere?

Atmospheric launch into a suborbital trajectory was demonstrated by White Knight, see [2]. There exist air-to-space missiles, see [3]. Admittedly, none of these are fully fledged space launches from the atmosphere, but they show it's not entirely outside the real of the plausible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_White_Knight [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT

Thanks for the links.

The Pegasus launcher launches satellites to orbit from an air-launched vehicle.

NASA is / was looking into this: the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC). Here's an article from 2014 about it [1]

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-...

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