Flying coach to Venus

To look in on who's flitting in and out of the Venus Capitol, let's start our calendar for 23 January 2225 Earth-Conjunction. (UPDATE 1/4/2020: Now that we know when that is.)

At Venus each Earth- and Moon-based regular (Hohmann) visitor is physically present from 15 March 2225 to 25 June 2226 ... maybe. Relevant to visitors On Business Not Pleasure: that last date overlaps when the 2226 visitors leave Earth. If said businessman dies or his boss replaces him on schedule, the next emissary boards ship caravan moves out 27 May 2226 and arrives at Venus 21 October. Starting from 27 May, Earth and Moon sojourners on Venus get the provisional passenger-manifests for incoming Hohmann and must worry they are Lame Ducks. Such waterfowl in the Venus tier, Capitol or otherwise, just have to wait it all out, to book tickets to Earth in the next four weeks or else to stay or to go elsewhere.

I call this span the Venus-Earth Carnivale.

Earthers at least can retire to the cities over Venus. I expect the Luneys will simply be boarding their own ships and stewing in those. It's good time to assemble material for The Memoir, they'll figure.

Anyway for both, their impending replacement opens a four month gap in their homes' representation. But since Earth (especially) has so many natives in the Venus-tier colonies, the Earth at a pinch can usually pick someone who's already here. Or can blast someone there real quick by ion-drive.

AVERTISSEMENT: Clowder's spreadsheet assumes circular orbits; this is true of Venus but less so for Earth. They're also not coplanar. So to figure Gregorian calendar-dates I didn't bother with a calculator; just searched for ".60..." on that very page. For those wanting more precision: find when Earth is least eccentric, or when you know NASA (or USSR) did a Hohmann to Venus, and figure the 8:13 ratio then.

OFFSET 11/5/2020: Hohmann passengers physically join and leave the caravan by shuttle en-route: joining later and leaving earlier than the caravan itself. Since only caravan crew are leaving Earth 27 May into the following June: over Venus, no ducks are certain that they are yet lamed. So their period is psychological, not legal... for that stretch. By the same token the ducks are assuredly lamed by 25 June and get shipped off Venus perhaps a fortnight after that. The following gap in interplanetary representation remains real, as a months-long affair though less than four.

METON 11/28/2020: As to cost and travel-time, the 2224-5 Earth-to-Venus corresponds to the January 1969 point in the pentagram; I calculate this from New Years Eve-ish 2000 between them. 99 degrees in 2000 so - four Octaeteris earlier - maybe 110 degrees "L" in 1969. Travel-time is less. It is usually less.