I came across a paper by someone at NASA Glenn Research Center and it proposed a floating human habitat in the upper atmosphere of Venus (50 km above its surface). The paper can be found here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20030022668.pdf ### Things I came across - Sabatier process - The paper called for a teleoperated exploration operation from the upper atmosphere - Roughly 1 atm of pressure, habitat in the atmosphere will not require a high strength pressure vessel for safe human habitation - With close to zero pressure differential between interior and exterior even a rather large tear in an air envelope would take thousands of hours to leak significant amounts of gas (which law governs this principle?) - Graham's law of effusion, from gas kinetics - If the size of tear is large, Graham's law becomes less applicable - Atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen are abundant. Basic elements needed for human survival can be found in the atmosphere - Surface material is apparently a basaltic silicate (no idea what that means) and materials such as silicon, iron, aluminum, magnesium, calcium, potassium, sodium can be mined from surface material - There was also a section on the ease of accessibility to asteroids from Venus. I do not understand orbital dynamics much so I will have to dig deeper to truly internalize his points.