feasible near term Venus settlements?

[radtech497]

Your point seems to be that there are examples where budgets haven't been allocated in a useful manner, therefore they can't be, therefore huge expenditures in space travel are a better option? That's a very shaky argument.

My point, if there is one to be made, is that (historically, at least), governments prefer not to make huge expenditures unless there is a politically popular need; it is much easier and cheaper to commission and endless number of "studies," nearly all of which end up in the recycling bin. A vast expenditure towards the colonization of Venus (or any other planet, at the current time) simply does not have the constituency to force the issue. As Tom Wolfe put it, in The Right Stuff, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

Radtech497