It may not be a place that we will go to, but as we explore the universe and look for other habitable planets, it is always good to know what kinds of planets there are, how they formed, and whether we could one day teraform them. It may be too early to prosper from all the answers that we can get from Venus, so the return on investment is lower than other explorations, but the answers are good to know, as they help us fill in pieces of the puzzle that is the universe.

Some day we may figure out how to build a rover for Venus that will last a decade.

You learn a lot by working the atmosphere. In fact, it’s already been done by two French balloons that floated in the atmosphere for two days back in 1985. Nonetheless, to study the geology you have to go down to the ground and sample it, like the rovers on Mars are doing.

Just to set the record straight, the last five Soviet Venus landers, Venera 10 through 14, all operated for more than hour on the surface, with the average generally closer to two hours. Venera 13 for example operated for more than 2 hours.The two probes before that all operated for more than 50 minutes, while Venera 7, the first to successfully send back data, operated for 23 minutes. See The Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space, pages 92, 106, 136, 161, 162, 182, 183.

Granted, the cost was high for so little operating time, but considering the hostile Venus surface environment these missions were hardly failures, they were engineering achievements of the first order.

Sadly considering the track record for probes making it to the surface of Venus its unlikely anyone is going to front the money anytime soon for something to get crushed or get 20 minutes of data for a billion bucks.