Venus, despite its harsh conditions, boasts valuable information that can only be uncovered by exploring it. At least that is what the author of "The Challenge of Exploring Venus" claims. Throughout the article, the author supports and enforces the idea that Venus' exploration involves many challenges, but scarcely explains the benefits of exploring it and consequently why it is worthy of pursuit despite the dangers.

The author firsts opens with several facts about Venus to instill a feeling of doubt within the reader. Through this, he leads into the main idea of the article by abruptly asking the question, "If your sister planet is so inhospitable, why are scientists even discussing further visits to its surface?" After a doubtful introduction, the author provides arguments of the benefits of returning to this hot, dense world. This was a crucial addition to the article that shows his consideration of uninformed readers by first explaining why Venus is so difficult to explore before beginning his first argument of the benefits of exploring Venus.

He promptly answers the question by again giving several facts about the history of Venus. The inherent nature of the first fact "Astronomers are fascinated by Venus because it may well have been the most Earth-like planet in our solar system" stirs the reader's curiosity, prompting the author to ask the next question to lead into his following argument. This paragraph serves to hook the reader's by giving relatively surprising facts about Venus that consequently describes the appeal for scientists to study such a planet.

After hooking the reader, the author should go in-depth about how Venus' similarities with Earth make it a valuable target for further research and exploration, but instead, he abruptly begins his next argument about the challenges of exploring Venus. Although the main idea of this article is the difficulties of exploring Venus, the author only addresses the value of exploring it in paragraphs four and eight. The rest of the paragraphs are dedicated to giving possible solutions to the impending goal of exploring the planet; however, he does not follow up on paragraph four's message that does not wholly explain the benefits of exploring Venus. At most, the author makes an argument that Venus is ripe for exploration because of its past similarities with Earth, but he does not explain why. Moreover, he introduces his next argument in paragraph five by making the dogmatic claim that "the value of returning to Venus seems indisputable" in paragraph four.

He nevertheless makes an arguably untenable argument about the dangers and difficulties of exploring Venus, but fails to support the idea that exploring it has value. In the end, the author did well in portraying the challenges involved when attempting to explore Venus, but he did not fully support his claim in paragraph four about the initial benefits of exploring it.