Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Artwork depicts Russia’s Venera-D design.
Image credit: Roscosmos/NPO Lavochkin

Russia is pressing forward on creation of a new Venus exploration spacecraft – Venera-D.

A “draft design” for Venera-D is scheduled to begin in January 2024.

Champion spacecraft design leaders, Russia’s NPO Lavochkin Scientific and Production Association, have blueprinted the Venera-D space complex.

Based on Lavochkin results, work schedules, technical specifications and the contracting of co-executing organizations for Venera-D have been formed, as has a Council of Chief Designers.

Image credit: Bulletin/NPO Lavochkin

Image credit: Bulletin/NPO Lavochkin

Refusal of the United States

Due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and implementation of US sanctions, then Roscosmos head, Dmitry Rogozin, announced that any continued participation between Russia and the United States on Venera-D was inappropriate.

Both Roscosmos and Lavochkin made clear in Internet postings that “the refusal of the United States to cooperate in no way affected the tasks of the Venera-D mission for remote and contact studies of the atmosphere, surface, internal structure and surrounding plasma of Venus at the modern scientific and technical level.”

Russia’s Roscosmos and the Russian Academy of Sciences are also working on the possibility of returning to Earth samples of the soil, atmosphere and aerosols of Venus – tagged as the Venera-V mission. “Its concept involves the consistent launch of completely new search-and-return and landing spacecraft,” reports Roscosmos.

The former Soviet Union, now Russia, has a rich history of Venus exploration, one that between 1961 and into the early 1980s scored a number of milestones in reconnoitering the cloud-veiled world – even from its hellish surface via short-lived landers.