Space Exploration Goals, Human Colonization
Mars or Venus
Mars gravity is not suitable for long-term human colonization. Lack of atmo is a huge problem, no protection against radiation or meteors (yes those rocks that mostly burn in our atmo, wout atmo the whole thing falls on your head).
Venus is relatively close, has the right gravity and its upper atmo, with the proper engineering, can be made habitable.
NASA has been clearly thinking about this possibility, with its High Altitude Venus Operational Concept: "The upper atmosphere of Venus, with similar pressure, density, gravity, and radiation protection to that of the surface of the earth, is relatively benign at 50 km. A lighter-than-air vehicle could carry either a host of instruments and probes, or a habitat and ascent vehicle for a crew of two astronauts to explore Venus for up to a month. Such a mission would require less time to complete than a crewed Mars mission"
Great idea but a new name with a different acronym than HAVOC might be called for, I propose Levitating AirborNe DOme - LANDO, also the name of a character in Star Wars, the leader of a floating city.
While [Venus and Mars] may not seem alike at first blush, Venus is quite similar to Earth compared to other planets in our solar system. So much so, the Morning Star is sometimes called Earth’s “sister planet”. Its gravity is 90% as strong as Earth’s, compared to Mars’ ~38%, meaning that our muscles won’t atrophy, and our bones won’t decalcify as they do in low-gravity environments
O'Neill Cylinders
Informative tweet storm
So today we're talking about O'Neill Cylinders! Space settlements have always been something straight out of sci-fi, but cool to talk about nonetheless. Today, I'm going to talk about what exactly are O'Neill cylinders, and what their capabilities consist of. 😎 #scicomm (1/21) pic.twitter.com/Kain29GDJN
— Joalda Morancy (@solarrsystem) June 22, 2020
O'Neill Cylinders can create Earth-like gravity and they can be built close to Earth. Jeff Bezos talked about the idea at length at a presentation (apparently he was once one of O'Neill's students)
Note the "planetary chauvinism" comment by Isaac Asimov.
Bezos talks about building the necessary elements so more people, organizations can explore space, in the same way he was able to build Amazon on elements that were available to him when he started in the 90s.
References
[1] Why Not Mars
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