There can be life in the clouds of Venus, and Rocket Lab wants to help find it.
The California-based space agency, that gives small spaceship dedicated trips to Earth Earth, intends to soon go interplanetary, with a robotic astrobiological mission to the second rock from the sun.
“I’m crazy in love with Venus,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said on August 5 during a business update and Q&A session livestreamed on YouTube. “I’m working very hard to put together a private mission to go to Venus in 2023.”
Related: Pictures of Venus, the mysterious planet next door
Life in the Venusian skies?
Beck’s love springs in part from the lessons we can learn Venus, which he described as “Earth in a climate change disaster.” But a greater motivator is the astrobiological potential of Venus.
Venus was a temperate world in the ancient past, with rivers, lakes and oceans that may have it lasted billions of years at a time. Then came the catastrophic change for climate change: A continuous greenhouse effect transformed the surface of Venus into a bone-dry hellscape with crushing atmospheric pressure and temperatures hot enough to melt lead.
But life on Venus, if it ever existed, may have found refuge in the air. Many scientists believe that potentially habitable pockets have been held in the atmosphere of Venus for long stretches, probably in the present day. About 30 miles (50 kilometers) up, for example, temperatures and pressures today are equal to those on the earth’s surface.
It is this aerial environment that Rocket Lab intends to target with the 2023 mission.
“We’ll learn a lot along the way there, and we’ll have a crack to see if we can discover what’s going on in that atmospheric zone,” Beck said. “And who knows? You might be able to hit the jackpot.”
Related: 6 most likely places for early life in the solar system
Electron and photons
The 2023 mission will use the two-stage Rocket Lab Electron booster and Photon satellite bus. The 57 meter (17 meter) electron is a viable option for interplanetary missions now, thanks to recent advances in battery technology which increase the performance of the Rutherford rocket engines.
With that improvement, Electron is now able to lift up to 660 lbs. (300 kilograms) loadload to low earth orbit instead of 500 lbs. (225 kg), representatives of Rocket Lab said.
“It opens the window for Venus, and it opens the window for restoration,” Beck said. (The company is working on restore and reuse the first stage of the Electron. Return boosters will re-introduce leads to the Earth’s atmosphere, which will require more fuel, which in turn will require more powerful engines to get the added weight off the ground.)
Photon, which has yet to make its spaceflight debut, will not land in the sulfurous skies of Venus on the upcoming mission. The current plan calls on the spacecraft to deploy one or more smaller probes into the planet’s atmosphere, Beck wrote in a Twitter post on August 4th.
There is, of course, no guarantee that life exists in the Venusian clouds, or that the planned restart of Rocket Lab will find it when it is there. But the mission could be a reconnaissance game changer, regardless of what the scientific return ends, “Beck said.
“At least I think it’s an emergency navigator, even for just a private mission to try to do something interplanetary,” he said. “That sends a message to the rest of the world that, ‘Hey, look – we can do these things privately.'”
The Venus mission will not be Rocket Lab’s first trip above Earth orbit, if all goes according to plan. The company recently signed a contract to fly a NASA satellite to the moon beginning 2021 using Electron and Photon.
Beck hopes the duo can do a fair bit of action in the coming years, offering dedicated, inexpensive rides to a variety of distant destinations.
“In general, if you want to do a scientific mission after the moon, you start writing a check for $ 50- $ 100 million,” he said. But with Photon coming online, “for $ 10-20 million, you can actually do some real science, interplanetary and lunar. That’s what excites me.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
