NASA Charts Return to Venus Amid Fresh Interest in Space Exploration
June 02 2021 - 5:56PM
Dow Jones News
By Doug Cameron
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it had
earmarked an initial $1 billion to send the first U.S. probes to
Venus in over 30 years, an effort to study what made the Earth's
nearest neighbor inhospitable to life.
NASA said on Wednesday that it picked Lockheed Martin Corp. to
build and operate two new spacecraft to study the planet's geology
and an atmosphere shaped by a runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists
believe that what once may have been oceans on Venus boiled away,
while an Earthlike climate deteriorated to leave a surface
temperature hot enough to melt lead.
Lockheed Martin plans to launch the spacecraft in 2026 and 2030,
respectively, and operate both under NASA's evolving public-private
partnership model, similar to its plans to return astronauts to the
moon later this decade.
Plans for the two programs come as NASA builds on the political
and public capital from a renaissance in space exploration. It has
celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts on domestic
rockets for the first time in more than a decade and the landing of
the Perseverance rover on Mars.
"We're ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an
Earthlike planet can become a hothouse," said Thomas Zurbuchen,
NASA's associate administrator for science.
Write to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 02, 2021 17:41 ET (21:41 GMT)
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