What we have learned

Or is it "learnen"? Anyway. Slightly over a year ago at the IQSA meeting in San Diego, whose first and best lectures I unfortunately missed, I mused about colonising Venus. I already had the Chernenko / Landis basics that we'd be settling the atmo. And then I posted some stuff I shouldn't have, and needed to fix.

When I figure the Settling Of Science I link it however over-eagerly I have figured it. I did a lot of that fixing over the four-and-half day weekend so here is where I will take a breather and discuss Lessons Learned.

In December I got to pondering aerodynamics. I figured I could use Venus' own headwinds and solar power to keep an aeroplane above the clouds for near-eternity. I learnt here that panels degrade, that they'd have to be VERY efficient to move any mass in bulk even here, and that there is - er - a difference between "fuel", "energy", and "propellant". Fuel being, for jets, the combination of both. So I'd not be using a jet turbine; I'd be using something more like an electrical Cessna which, luckily for me, did actually get invented this year. Still, as time went on I realised this was pointless and the "forever flotilla" idea unworkable. Probably about when I started pondering Pluto Ramjets of all things.

Meanwhile I considered a nuclear powered Cessna. I dropped that notion too for efficiency's sake. Although I revived it on the helicopter principle for a power-plant balloon lower in the clouds.

On the Libration orbits, learning what libratio actually means - another focus of orbit - was fun. Much rewriting of my December posts ensued.

Boy howdy did I ever find out more than I wanted to know about Venus' "sphere" of influence. My problem there was that I got caught up in the Libration Points, specifically L2, so I thought that might be the marker buoy and I marked the outlying satellites accordingly. L1/2 is not the marker. Neither is the Hill Sphere, between them - necessarily. SVL2 is at a million km out. The SoI is 616 thousand km out. In that shell between the spher(oid)s is nothing stable. UPDATE 12/9: and for actual orbits we're looking below 536412 km.

Zubrin taught me about Hohmann and, here, what caught me out was the notion of "opposition class", where Mars shoots stuff to Earth (1) off-Hohmann and (2) inside Earth's orbit. The Earth-Venus route has, historically, done (1): Pioneer 12 is the best example I find. Nobody does (2) for Venus' own sake. The point of (2) was to use Venus on the "fry by" to get to another outer-planet.

This segues into, why skip the Hohmann to Venus in the first place. Besides simple delay back home, a la Venus Express, I find that the angles matter. Relative to Earth these cycle, synod by synod, in accordance with Lucifer's Pentagram. That will expand on the Venerean calendar which I still think will be exactly the Earth / Venus duet, minus two days per eight Earth years. Anyway if you want to inject into a more circular orbit from the start, Pioneer 12's long route or even Magellan's two-orbit route will be where you start.

Especially now we know the journey to Venus differs from synod to synod (I always knew Hop David's timetable was approximate, but underestimated how much), it is vital we get a day to anchor the (Earth / Venus) calendar. We get that in the Conjunction.

Along the way I've pondered settling Venus' surface (katabatic wind power at Maxwell east), what we do in the cloud-layer (farm 50 north), relaying more energy to cold SVL2 (high-orbit polar satellites), trapping hydrogen (en route to L2). Although here I didn't need to retract much.