Hi Everyone!
What type of spacecraft, space suits and vehicles would have to be developed to make it possible for human explorers to actually explore the surface of the planet Venus?
Could some kind of permanent science base be built for long-term exploration?
It is sufficiently impractical that it will probably never be done.
better suntan lotion is being worked on as we speak.
I’ll go one better than that and say that it is not possible for any practical purpose. The conditions experienced on the surface of Venus are so inhospitable that even hardened probes can only last a few scores of minutes. Nor is there any particular value to human exploration of the surface of Venus. There is nothing that can be done by humans that cannot be done probably better and certanly more cheaply by robotic probes, which only have to be protected for the duration of their operation and then can be abandoned without the expense of return.
In fact, there is little practical need for human exploration of space at all, and if exploration or habitation is desired, it optimistically represents an increase of cost of about two orders of magnitude over robotic exploration to perform comparable function. Realistic long term habitation would require replicating an Earth-like environment in terms of simulated gravity, radiation shielding, and other considerations that would provide a secure and healthy environment for humans. This isn’t saying that this shouldn’t be done, but the costs are extraordinary, and would require a space based infrastructure to practically support.
Stranger
Isn’t it more a matter of engineering and materials science?
I could see if you were trying to go faster than the speed of light, than THAT might be impossible, but I can’t imagine science and engineering couldn’t solve the problems of manned exploration of Venus.
It’s 800 degrees in the shade there, and it rains sulfuric acid. The atmospheric pressure on the surface is 1350 p.s.i. Why would you even want to go there? And even if you could develop the materials needed to protect a human population on the surface, it would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars to pull it off. Are you seriously suggesting that we bankrupt the global economy to expedite your little project? I mean, unless you’re proposing that we set up a penal colony for people who refuse to stop using Comic Sans font, what possible justification could there be for even entertaining the idea?
The temperature on the surface will melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure coats in the planet in a kind of ‘sea’ of carbon dioxide. Unless there are some serious advances in materials humans in any kind of suit imaginable available today would die, quickly.
Maybe one day in the far future we could terraform that mofo, although if we have the tech to do that we’d probably be better off focussing on Mars and the Jovian moons. The day length on Venus is longer than its year, another in a long list of reasons it is poorly suited for a human presence.
I’d venture to say that a “suit” used to get around on the surface would have to blur the lines between “garment” and “vehicle” so much that it’d make more sense just to build the latter (for…whatever the world you’d want to see on the surface with your own eyes. Hey, I ain’t judging, but…melted rocks?).
And airborne research platforms might actually be more practical than a surface outpost. (Note, “more” practical. This is faint praise. 
)
…your grant proposal just got rejected, I take it?
Don’t write off Venus as a target for colonisation or exploitation yet.
As Ranchoth’s link pointed out;
In addition the abundant sunlight in this location would make solar powered atmosphere skimmers feasible; a spacecraft could dip in, scoop up CO2 and regain orbit using solar energy. A slow process, but essentially a free lunch. Carbon and oxygen would both be valuable materials for use in the colonisation of elsewhere in the solar syustem, including Venus orbit (the nitrogen might be valuable, too.)
If you really want to mess about on the surface of the planet you could use teleoperated robots; 450 Celsius is too hot for people, but I expect robot technology will eventually allow operations in this sort of temperature (but it might be a marginal activity, like exploring the oceans on Earth).
Some engineering problems are just too hard to solve - it’s not exactly the same as FTL - that’s impossible, not just too hard.
It’s trivially easy to define an engineering problem for which no viable solutions can possibly exist; for example: Design a craft capable of travelling to the core of the sun, to be constructed entirely of chocolate.
Yeah, mind there are only so many elements in the universe and for all practical purpose we know of all the ones that could be used to produce a macro-level device like a Venus ground based explorer for humans to run around in. By and large the elements we know about and have any serious abundance of simply cannot survive for long at all on Venus because of the conditions.
Now, sure, you can get different physical properties of different materials with advances in materials science. That’s why in relatively recent history we’ve developed say, new arrangements of carbon in ways that are much stronger than before, or why we’ve developed new types of steel even in the second half of the 20th century. But it becomes difficult to get around innate melting point of the underlying element itself, there might be ways using tons of energy you could draw the heat continuously out of something and push it back into the atmosphere to try and stave off the melting but not being an engineer I’m not sure that is physically possible and I’m sure it isn’t practical.
So it’s a dry heat?
I think we’re not answering the OP’s question. They are not asking will we do it (we won’t) but what would it take to do so if we wanted to.
Basically something that can hold up to heat, pressure, and be non-reactive to the atmosphere. The 90 bars atmosphere is eqivalent to being in water at a depth of 900m which I believe is the limit out manned submaines could go. The heat is not an issue for a lot of structual materials we could use (ceramics, carbon, titanium, etc.) but how to make it so it doesn’t get slagged by the sulfuric acid is another issue.
Just pointing out that there are materials that and withstand the pressure or have a melting point above the surface temperature of Venus does not answer the question. Certainly you can make a ceramic vessel that can withstand the temperature and would be resistant to the corrosive conditions. Whether you could make a vessel of such material strong enough so resist a pressure differential of over 1000 psi is largely a scaling matter, i.e. increasing the wall thickness. However, then making your massive thick-walled vessel useful for any practical purpose is the engineering problem that may not be soluble. The question in the o.p. is “What type of spacecraft, space suits and vehicles would have to be developed to make it possible for human explorers to actually explore the surface of the planet Venus?” Spacecraft, suits, and vehicles require articulating or propulsive components, seals, fasteners, hatches, instruments for observation, et cetera, all of which compromise the integrity of the protective materials.
The other issue is heat. Here on planet Earth, the temperatures are sufficiently moderate and the ambient fluid medium has such low capacity for maintaining elevated temperatures that we don’t generally worry about rejecting excess heat by convection and radiation. In the environments in which heat rejection is a problem–say, in the engine block of an automobile engine or in a power plant–we use cooling loops with water or some other fluid to “pump”, i.e. reject heat out to the ambient environment, which again, is very moderate. In space, temperatures on the Sun-facing side of vehicles can get very hot, but on the leeward side we can radiate heat to the 3.7 K radiative background, so again it is relatively easy to reject excess heat by using cooling systems or just shading our craft from the Sun. It is difficult enough to make a heat shield which protects a spacecraft during the few minutes of reentry, and this is against the very thin upper atmosphere where the amount of ambient heat is minimal. (The heating during reentry is primarily due to compression of the air in front of a vehicle moving at hypersonic speed, and most heat shields work by actually creating a shock boundary that forms a thermal standoff, forcing the high temperature plasma around the outer mold line of the vessel and resisting the thermal radiation at the boundary.)
On the surface of Venus, however, the ambient temperatures are extreme, and the high heat capacity of the atmosphere works against us. We would have to reject heat at a temperature exceeding the ambient 735 K. In order to maintain a habitable temperature–say, 300 K–we would have to accept the excess heat from the interior of the vessel, pump it up by over 400 K, and then reject into the ambient environment. Doing this much work to reject heat will create more heat, which also has to be rejected, ad nauseam. In short, it would be thermodynamically impossible to maintain a vessel at habitable temperature for an extended duration. You would basically have to carry a heat sink with you–say, a block of frozen carbon dioxide–and let it evaporate to provide cooling for the (short) duration of your stay. So, aside from any material science issues, the heat rejection problem is essentially insoluble without some kind of technomagical innovation which subverts the laws of thermodynamics.
Mangetout and Chronos are both correct; not all “engineering problems” are practically soluble, and this one is so impractical and unnecessary that it will likely never be done. I can’t imagine any substance that would be so valuable and only obtainable on the surface of Venus to justify such an effort, and if there were, we would have to use automated equipment which is intended to be discarded on the surface after it becomes non-functional in order to recover it.
Stranger
I just discovered an article from Harper’s magazine given the title - no doubt by an editor, not the writer, John McPartland - of “No Go, Space Cadet!” McPartland soberly lays out the problems with manned exploration of space and other planets and strongly advocates for instrument-only missions.
The article appeared in the July, 1952 issue of Harper’s.
One of the problem you’re overlooking is how materials change under temperature and pressure. For example, a sub may be able to withstand the pressure in a 36-degree ocean, but a submarine heated to 900 degrees will be crushed at that depth.
Then you have issues of how to handle maintenance and repairs to damage. For example, let’s say there’s a Venus-quake that cracks your habitat. Did you build with enough strength to handle some damage without collapsing on you instantly? Who’s going to go outside to fix it, and how are they going to work?
So lets hollow out an asteroid, fill it up with water, dirt, plants, animals people, light and crap…spin that sucker like a top and fling it out of the solar system already!
Here’s a sawbuck to help defray the costs.
Same way they built the thing in the first place.
I wasn’t overlooking anything. I was simply pointing out that we have engineering that can handle the pressure and materials that can handle the heat so that at least some of the engineering would not be impossible. I never said that a titanium sub could be dropped on Venus and survive.
One overlooked fact: Getting people back off Venus would be a trick in itself.