NASA Venus Cloud City Project: Would You Live in a Floating Community Outer Space?

Humanity's next home is Venus -- at least according to NASA's most recent ambition. As told by the Examiner, the space agency is in its conceptual stages of building a cloud city atop our sister planet, under the project called High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC).

The idea presents a floating city 50 km above the planet's hellish surface. Although Venus appears to share some similarities with Earth, the Examiner noted that it's also the densest of any other planet, having an average surface temperature of 460°C (860°F). That's way hotter than boiling point, so we're still raising eyebrows as to how NASA can actually execute its plans.

Chris Jones from the Space Mission Analysis Branch of NASA's Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley Research Center (Virginia) told IEEE, "The vast majority of people, when they hear the idea of going to Venus and exploring, think of the surface, where it's hot enough to melt lead and the pressure is the same as if you were almost a mile underneath the ocean."

"I think that not many people have gone and looked at the relatively much more hospitable atmosphere and how you might tackle operating there for a while," he added.

It has been well-established that NASA's apple of the eye is Mars -- as Gizmodo puts it, we've visited the Red Planet "nearly two dozen times" already, so all the more our other celestial neighbor gets interesting.

According to the outlet, Venus' atmosphere is made up of thick clouds of sulphuric acid. The composition of its air is predominantly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, culminating in the so-called Greenhouse Effect.

The Greenhouse Effect centers on the principle of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas -- it warms and traps heat from the Sun. Universe Today compared the scenario to keeping one's car windows closed during a hot day. Additionally, the source indicated that Venus' carbon dioxide atmosphere is about 92 times denser than ours.

Interestingly, Popular Science wrote that the travel time to Venus is much shorter than Mars'. It would take about 400 days to get into the former, while a mission to the latter would need 650 to 900 days.

Should humans ever thrive in Venus, Business Insider noted that it will have to be in the clouds, away from the dangers of its scorching surface. To illustrate how terrible the Venusian landscape is, the outlet cited the fate of Soviet's 1981 Venera 13 lander -- which survived 127 minutes before finally dying into oblivion.

Would you like to live in NASA's floating city? Sound off in the comments section!

For more information about HAVOC, click here.

Check out NASA Langley Research Center's concept video of HAVOC below.