Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say - The Guardian

Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission.

“Venus gets a bad rap because it’s got such a difficult surface environment,” said Dr Noam Izenberg of the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory and one of the proponents of the Venus flyby.

Izenberg said there were practical arguments for incorporating a Venus flyby into the crewed Mars landing that Nasa hopes to achieve by the late 2030s.

That would make a crewed flyby trip to Venus a natural stepping stone towards Nasa’s ultimate goal.

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets raises the question of how many might be habitable, and scientists want to understand how and why Venus, a planet so similar to our own in size, mass and distance from the sun, ended up with infernal surface conditions.

He said Venus was rightly a focus of scientific exploration, but that “a human flyby really wouldn’t add very much”