In September 2020, a team of researchers from MIT announced that they had discovered phosphine in the clouds of the planet Venus is a chemical compound whose presence in detected concentrations indicates the presence of life forms in the atmosphere of the neighboring planet.

The results have been, as expected, controversial, but Peter Beck hopes that Rocket Lab, the company he runs, will clear things up: This week it announced the first commercial mission to Venus (developed and financed entirely by private resources).

Who is Peter Beck? An entrepreneur from New Zealand who noticed that more and more people wanted to launch small satellites, so he created Rocket Lab, which developed a rocket called Electron specifically designed for such light payloads.

The idea was to offer a cheap and fast service, meaning that someone who wants to launch a Cubesat does not have to wait more than a year from order to launch. It is debatable whether his idea is successful, but the Electron is one of the small rockets that even flies quite well (only 3 failures out of 29 launches): it lifts only 300 kilograms into orbit (the Falcon 9 can lift over 22 tons), but it only for $7-8 million USD (Falcon 9 costs somewhere around $50 million), and once it starts recovering the rocket’s first stage, Rocket Lab hopes to be able to reduce costs even more (it’s working hard on it).

But let’s not get too carried away, what does the Electron rocket (powered by Rutherford engines, I forgot to mention that fine detail, one of the reasons I love this New Zealand company) have to do with the exploration of the planet Venus? Well, Peter Beck quickly realized that he would not be able to make much profit from launching small satellites (although he signed several contracts with the famous American spy agency, the National Reconnaissance Office), so he expanded his company’s portfolio in other directions.

For example, he also began to produce slightly more complex upper gears. These upper stages are rocket engines with a full tank attached to the satellite you’re about to launch into space, and they give it an orbit, that is, push it into the correct orbit or trajectory before the satellite and the mind. his own business (the term used in English literally means kick-stage).

Rocket Lab named this upper stage Photon (after the Curie thrusters), and it is quite versatile, meaning it can be used in all types of missions. For example, NASA used an Electron rocket equipped with such a Photon booster to send the CAPSTONE probe to the Moon (launched on June 28). The probe stumbled a bit on its way to the moon because immediately after detaching from Photon it refused to send telemetry or communicate with Earth, but recovered after a few hours.

In any case, the little problem that had already been solved was with the probe, not the missile or the Photon’s upper unit, so Peter Beck breathed a sigh of relief. And because they deliberately put more fuel into it than was necessary, the Photon made one more orbit after it finished its work for NASA, and Rocket Lab actually played with the equipment again, testing its limits.

Peter Beck is an interesting character. If you don’t believe me, watch on YouTube how he ate his hat because he lost a bet with himself. One of his crazy ideas is to mount some relatively simple scientific instruments on this photon stage and send it to Venus.

Probably next May. That is, it will reach Earth orbit on an Electron launch vehicle, from where a Curie engine will push the Photon stage until it exits Earth orbit and heads into the atmosphere of Venus, where it is expected to arrive in January 2025. It won’t. survive for more than 5 minutes, but that will be enough to reach an altitude of about 50-60 km, collecting and transmitting real-time data from the hell of Venus.

It will be a simple, low-cost mission fully supported by a private organization, the first in interplanetary exploration. Could this be the start of a new trend with small, cheap probes launched in a few months by light-caliber rockets to other celestial bodies?

NASA and ESA are preparing complex and expensive missions to Venus (a planet that seems to have been forgotten in recent decades, when all the attention and funds were directed to Mars): VERITAS (Venus emissivity, radio science, InSAR, topography and spectroscopy) and DAVINCI+ (Exploration of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging in the Deep Atmosphere of Venus) are American missions that will be launched in 2027 and 2029, respectively, and EnVision is a European orbital probe that will not be launched until 2031.

Of course, they will have more and more sophisticated scientific instruments on board, but what if the low-cost mission of a New Zealand entrepreneur becomes the first to confirm the existence of life on a planet other than Earth?