In "The Challenge of Exploring Venus," the author suggests that the exploration of Venus is worth its risks. In the article, they state that it would be worth investigating because there is a potential that humans could survive there, but not without its challenges. The author provides a fair amount of evidence that states Venus could be an issue to gather information about. Overall, the author provides a contradicting article and is somewhat difficult to understand what side he supports, exploring Venus or to not.

The author provides reasons that Venus should actually be looked into. The reasons the author provides are: the geographical conditions on Venus used to be similar to what Earth has today, that the planet is the closest planet to ours, and could have at one point, "...supported various forms of life, analogous to those on Earth." The author doesn't provide a lot of evidence for any of these reasons other than the types of geographical features that are similar between Earth and Venus. The author does, however, provide technology-related solutions to the problems relating to how we could explore Venus. The author provides blimp-like, manned vehicles that could get within 30 miles or so above the planet. The author also provides simplified electronics made of a material known as, silicon carbide that could survive three weeks in the conditions that Venus has. The author then concludes his reasoning with how, "... human curiousity will likely lead us into many equally intimidating endeavors." This simply means that we're just as likely to do something as risky and fear-inducing as exploring Venus and that we shouldn't be imaginatively contained because there are dangers that could possibly limit our expansion.

While the author has some reasons supporting the exploration of Venus, they have provided many challenges NASA, or any other space program, would have to overcome and downfalls to the planet. The author provides reasons such as: no aeronautic vehicle has been able to survive the landing for more than a few hours, the planet's atmosphere is almost 97% carbon dioxide, the temperature is 90 times greater than Earth's (800 degrees Farenheit), the pressure on the surface is enough to crush a submarine accustomed to diving in the deepest parts of our oceans, and how our use of modern computers would be limited due to the extreme physical conditions that they would have to withstand. The author provides an abundance of, somewhat, overwhelming reason that we shouldn't continue to proceed exploration of Venus.

While the author provides some good reasons to explore Venus and what it contains, they also happened to contradict almost every reason with why it would be a bad idea to pursue it, which is fairly counter-intuitive. The author perhaps meant to give these reasons to warn us and for us to bear the information of how it could go wrong, or how it would be a struggle and then come to terms with the idea that it would still be a good idea to explore Venus. But again, its also comprehended that the author themself doesn't want us to explore the planet. I feel that the author clearly portrayed the distaste that the exploration could bring and less clearly of why and how it would be a good idea.