Since OceanGate completely shut down, including finally replacing their entire website with just a “we’re closed” page, co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein has some extra time on his hands. He’s decided his next business venture is “Humans2Venus”, which is sending 1000 people by 2050 to colonize Venus. Maybe he doesn’t want Elon Musk to get all the glory with colonizing Mars.
This just screams “I have no idea what’s involved but I want to do it anyway.” Cue the questions of “What makes you think this will work when your Titanic tourism didn’t?”
So what is involved in this venture? Conditions on Venus are as follows:
- An atmosphere that is 96.5% CO2.
- Passing through an upper atmosphere that is mostly sulfuric acid to get to the surface, which is under a permanent greenhouse effect, so there’s no water on the planet.
- Surface temperatures that average 847 °F / 453 °C, except at the North Pole where it is -41 °C.
- Atmospheric pressure at the surface of 92 atm. For comparison, pressure on the Titanic is 400 atm.
- The length of a day on Venus is 243 Earth days, but the trip around the sun only takes 224.7 Earth days.
Whether it’s colonizing Venus or colonizing Mars, you either have to transport all of the habitat structures with you or you bring machinery with you so you can being mining natural resources to build your habitats and infrastructure. And in this case, you have to transport a lot of water unless you’ve got something really good at moisture farming (to use the Star Wars term) the 0.002% water vapor in the atmosphere. Cue the jokes about consulting with Kevin Costner about his experience in conserving water in the movie Waterworld or the crew of the Red Dwarf having to drink Urine Recyc Wine when they run out of Leopard Lager.
But let’s say they get those kinds of logistics worked out. None of our past spaceships have been massive cargo carriers. They’re going to need multiple spaceships to do it, maybe a fleet of a dozen or more. It takes an average of 4 months each way to make the trip.
What happens the first time there’s a catastrophic failure of a spacecraft? People are going to point right back at the implosion of OceanGate’s Titan and demand the whole thing gets shut down. Anyone that is already on Venus will have to be retrieved.
It’s a nice idea, but not a practical one, especially given that it’s been less than two months since the Titan imploded.