I'm happy to see NASA plan missions to Venus, but also kind of sad that these two are a basic orbiter and a drop pod. I know how much more difficult it would be, but I was hoping for an airship.
The missions are part of the Discovery Program and are intended to be "small" (by NASA standards) missions.
They basically selected hardware that uses flight-proven sensors and instruments derived from existing and flown hardware plus one delivered by the German space agency to minimise risks and costs.
An airship would blow up the mission to a flagship-type mission, which wouldn't fit the program and would never be approved (especially in light of the utter disaster that both JWST [1] and NGRST aka WFIRST [2] turned out to be).
I'm also happy for new Venus missions and I don't mind less ambitious missions at all - I'd rather have a successful "boring" orbiter and a basic atmospheric probe by 2030 than a grandiose proposal that maybe gets approved by 2025 and then launches in 2040 :)
In my dreams, humanity colonizes Venus much more readily than Mars, because Venus has much more energy to tap into, has a much stronger atmosphere, and at the closest point in orbits, Venus is far closer.
I envision Bespin-like floating cities, high above the ground, with long geothermal tendrils, designed to withstand the extreme atmospheric conditions, and convert heat energy into electrical energy.
Maybe, just maybe, these missions will inspire new research in the possibility of human habitats based in the high atmosphere.
