The 1st private mission to Venus comes together ahead of possible 2026 launch (photos)

Two men in white lab coats handle a yellow cone-shaped capsule on a metal workbench.

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley report progress in installing a heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus.

Rocket Lab of Long Beach, California, is leading the effort, along with their partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NASA's Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) was invented at the NASA Ames center.

NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology program, part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, supported the development of the heat shield for Rocket Lab’s Venus mission.

Woven heat shield

HEET is a textured material covering the bottom of the capsule, a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2482 degrees Celsius).

The private Venus probe would be deployed from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus.

An illustration shows the Rocket Lab Photon spacecraft above the clouds of Venus (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley attach the HEET heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus. (Image credit: NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete)

This probe will take measurements as it descends through the clouds of Venus.

"We missed our January 2025 launch window and now wait until the next one summer 2026," said MIT's Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and leader of the Morningstar Missions to Venus team – a series of planned missions designed to investigate the possibility of life in Venus' clouds.

The science phase of the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus targets the Venus cloud layer between 72 and 97 mile altitude, enabling around 330 seconds of science observations. (Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center)

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The first mission, a collaboration with Rocket Lab, is the small, low-cost probe designed to measure autofluorescence and backscattered polarized radiation to detect the presence of organic molecules in the clouds.

That spacecraft is now going on Rocket Lab's yet-to-fly Neutron booster, instead of an Electron launcher, so the private Venus mission is tied to the Neutron coming online, Seager told Inside Outer Space.

"On my side, we completed the instrument build and had our first integration tests with the probe, the part that will be dropped off into the Venus atmosphere. All is progressing," said Seager.