Why not Venus?

One reason an expedition to Mars is forever two decades away is because of the leap in difficulty between landing to the Moon and going to Mars. There’s not a big difference in energy between the two destinations. Any rocket that can land on the moon can easily put a crew in Martian orbit. The issue is time.As we saw recently with Artemis II, a spaceship can get human cargo to the Moon and back in about ten days. But orbital mechanics makes it hard to complete a trip to Mars in less than two years, and rigid launch windows further constrain options for abort or rescue. Bridging the gap between the two weeks we’ve spent on the Moon and the long, committal journey we’d have to make to Mars runs us into a thicket of difficulties. In other words, the ladder to the stars is missing some rungs. It would be nice if there was a class of mission intermediate in difficulty between the Moon and Mars, one that didn’t take us so far out of our experience base and had better abort options than…