24 October 2016 - landing on Venus

Europe landed nicely on Titan, which is easy to land on. Europe has repeatedly run into trouble landing on Mars and on a comet, which are hard. So if the European Space Agency needs help in its budget talks, maybe they should make Venus their planet—its air is so thick that you can drop to the surface like a rock and land softly (before you die of the heat, that is). It will be a good joke on Elon Musk if it turns out that humans can’t reproduce in Mars gravity, and the first space colonies float high in the atmosphere of Venus, just above the sulfuric acid haze.