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Re:NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine... by sdenton4 on Sunday March 28, 2021 @12:57PM (#26611934)
I think you can design in error tolerance, with a bit of imagination. Imagine a flotilla of connected balloons, instead of one giant balloon; build in enough tolerance that a sagging balloon is supported by its neighbors until it can be fixed up.

Ultimately, it's a question of building a floating thing, and keeping it floating. This strikes me as not-too-hard, compared to the usual space problem of trying to hold oxygen in a bubble in a vacuum. You just need a sustainable way to 'recharge' the balloons; that really just means filtering lighter gasses from the air and pumping them in faster than they leak out. The Venus atmosphere is primarily CO2 with a bit of nitrogen; the game is then filtering out CO2 and filling the balloons with nitrogen. Coincidentally, we have people putting lots of thought into efficiently filtering CO2 from air already...

Re:NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine... by gremlinsinc on Sunday March 28, 2021 @07:50PM (#26616052)
Does it need to float? Could not some sort of mountain plateau work that's the right altitude but perfectly solid ground, just high in the sky?
Re:NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine... by nobodyandproud on Sunday March 28, 2021 @07:57PM (#26616103)
The safe height is on the order of 50 to 60 kilometers up, so that’s a tall order.