Mars isn't going anywhere.
, a group of space experts is campaigning to shift the focus away from human exploration of Mars and towards first sending a crewed mission to our nearest neighbor, Venus.The group presented their argument at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last week. They stated that, as Venus is significantly closer to Earth than Mars, a crewed mission to Venus could be completed in a fraction of the time and would provide valuable data for future Mars missions.
A return mission to Venus would be doable in approximately a year, while a mission to Mars and back could take about three years in total. So a crewed Venus mission would have the benefit of allowing scientists and astronauts to learn more about the effects of prolonged deep space exploration on the human body in a fraction of the time. The downside is that humans wouldn't be able to land on Venus, and they would simply perform a crewed flyby.
However, a flyby would also be very valuable from a scientific perspective, as scientists believe we might find microbial life in the clouds of Venus. Planetary scientists also want to know how a planet that was once thought to have been so similar to Earth became the hellish inferno it is today.send a spacecraft to Venus
to investigate. It expects to launch its uncrewed mission by next year. If all goes to plan, it will become the first private space company to reach another planet, beating SpaceX to the punch. NASA and the European Space Agency are also working on
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