Spaceflight Company 'Rocket Lab' aims to launch private mission to Venus in 2023

California-based Spaceflight Company Rocket Lab recently joined hands with NASA for its first interplanetary mission. So far, Rocket Lab had only been able to put small spacecraft into Earth's orbit, but now, it is aiming to go interplanetary. Rocket Lab’s Venus Mission is a robotic astrobiology mission that aims to find signs of life on Venus. In a recent Q&A session posted on the company’s official YouTube channel, its founder and CEO Peter Beck said that he is madly in love with Venus. He further revealed that at Rocket Lab, he is working hard to put together a private mission to go to Venus in 2023.

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Is there life on Venus?

According to a report by Space.com, Venus had a temperate world in the ancient past. The planet had rivers, lakes, and even oceans, which had lasted for billions of years. However, all of this was lost when the planet faced a climate-change disaster. A runaway Greenhouse Effect changed that planet’s surface. Venus's atmospheric pressures became crushing and the temperatures became hot enough to melt lead.

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The report further mentions that if life on Venus still continued to exist, it may have found refuge in the sky. Many scientists believe that there are habitable pockets in Venus' atmosphere. Hence, Venus’s aerial environment is what the Rocket Lab 2023 mission intends to target.

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How will Rocket Lab conduct the mission?

Rocket Lab’s 2023 mission will employ its two-stage Electron booster and Photon satellite bus. The Electron Booster is 57-foot or 17 metres tall. A Rocket Lab’s representative has stated that Electron is already capable of lifting up to 660 lbs. or 300 kilograms of payload to low-Earth orbit. In a Twitter post on August 4, Peter Beck wrote that the Photon Satellite is yet to make its spaceflight debut, and will not be descending into Venus' sulfurous skies in the coming mission. Rocket Lab’s current place is to deploy the spacecraft’s one or more smaller probes into the planet's atmosphere.

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There is no guarantee that life exists in the Venusian clouds. However, Rocket Lab's Venus mission can potentially be a big game-changer. The report states that the company’s CEO has expressed hope that, along with NASA’s support Rocket Lab might be able to move the bar on interplanetary travel high up. In the upcoming years, there can be more missions dedicated to low-cost rides to a variety of distant destinations.