Manned mission to Venus

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For any of you astrophysicists out there I was wondering if it would be possible with todays technology to land a man on Venus for say 30 minutes, do some experiments and get rock samples then to leave the surface and return to an orbiting spacecraft. Landing on Venus would be easy. Your spacesuit might be able to protect you from the 450 degree heat and 100 atmosphere pressure for say half an hour but what of the spaceship. How would you protect the fuel tanks. You would need at least 72% of the fuel needed to take of from the Earth for Venus's 0.9G. During take of how would the jets from the engines be effected by the high atmospheric pressure and what about drag from the thick Venusian atmosphere.

I'm definitely for Venus exploration but almost anything a man can do there could be done by remote operated rovers. Its way too risky- and billions of dollars for such a short manned mission wouldn't seem worth it. There are a lot of good ways that Venus could be explored though- men could feasibly explore certain upper layers of the atmosphere and do remote operation from there

venus is in no way a stop for anything more than probes and rovers untill the solar system is at least partly industrialized.
to launch any kind of habitat from earth would be economical madness.

Certainly sending a manned mission to Venus orbit would certainly be possible, and probably easier than sending a manned mission to Mars. But why bother? Probes can do that. Exploring the atmosphere would be possible too, (although again, I don't know why bother) and probably would require some experience with space before we'd be ready. Landing someone on the surface sounds pretty near out of the question for now. Certainly it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to leave the spacecraft in a suit. I'm pretty sure to withstand that pressure and temperature the suit would have to be way to heavy. Not to say those problems can never be overcome, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Getting off of Venus would be a royal pain. There is a thick atmosphere, meaning lots of drag to overcome. Of course, that means you'd get lots of lift too. But the high pressures would really make it hard for the rockets to function--I don't know enough about the physics to say how easily or not that could be overcome. Also, I don't think there is anything in the atmosphere you could use for fuel, meaning you'd have to carry all of your fuel with you on your rocket. We can do that of course (it's how our current ones work) but it is extremely costly. And just imagine trying to carry a Falcon9 or AtlasV to Venus.

Good point that its not worth risking billions of dollars and human life when rovers/robots can take the risk but still it is a fasinating problem which would better mans understand of space technology.

Even if somehow astronauts from sulfuric acid, the infernal heat and the insane pressure, there still the problem that Venus is about the same size as Earth. You will need to bring to the surface a massive rocket for a chance to astronauts to come back, unless using a powerfull nuclear engine no available today. (you will need a lot of massive rockest from Earth to built this massive rocket in space too.)

There are a number of designs for Venus probes under current development for deployment around 2015. Although the instruments in orbit have so far been much more successful.

There is a serious issue not only cooling the rocket fuel, but even the systems electronics. Space qualified electronics can currently survive to about 100 C ambient conditions. To deal with this all the proposed probe systems are packed in a lithium based gel that cools the probe as it melts.

The first problem with a manned mission would be the timing, Even if you stayed on the surface for only 30 min you would need to stay in orbit for almost two years before the planets align properly in their orbit to return to earth. Even longer for the type of gravity assist manoeuvre Ruveyn mentioned.

Then the 90+ atmosphere pressure, in probe missions they deal with this by using a titanium pressure vessel, then filling the interior with a liquid that boils off during decent to the planet, pressurizing the interior to 80+ atmospheres. If a person was inside this would be a serious problem, you cannot pressurize or depressurize a human during the 1-2h the descent takes, so you would have to make the vessel 10x stronger to support the full pressure. There would also be complicated issues with the gas mixture to avoid poisoning the person with oxygen or nitrogen. How you make a space suit for the surface, i have no idea, I doubt we have that technology yet.

etc.

you wouldnt have to lift off from the bottom of the atmosphere, boyancy is your friend, think of the venutian atmosphere as consisting of a large ocean instead of gas.

as many others have said before in much greater detail, the surface is no place for a living human and any extended surface operations would have to rely on skyborn electronics as most other components are far easier to protect against the conditions.

i wonder what kind of surface composition you might find mineral wise though, with such an active surface there must be some interesting stuff to find somewhere.

The problems with the electronics overheating can be solved in part, perhaps in the next 10yrs using instead of silcon based component , components made from diamond instead. There is a company in the USA trying to grow diamond wafers using the vapour disposition method, I think its called then to make an n type and p type diamond material, the silicon equivalent. Components made from diamond can run at higher temperatures and have a lower coefficient of expansion. When probes are sent down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench the pressure of Venus is insignificant in comparison. Perhaps when the technology is there carbon natotube fibre inside a ceramic shell with electronics made from diamond will give a probe on the surface a longer life.

I don't see how they would get around the problem of the, y'know, Sulphuric Acid clouds. Most polymers (all, I would suspect) are made from carbon bonds that a strong acid would chew through in a second.