These 5 Venus missions could launch in the next decade to study Earth's 'evil twin'

Venus just lost its last active spacecraft, but more might be coming in a few years.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki mission orbiting Venus was declared dead last week after engineers spent more than a year trying to get in touch with the silent spacecraft. Akatsuki spent a decade orbiting the planet and was well beyond its design lifetime when its mission ended, giving unprecedented looks at the hellish atmosphere of Venus.

While this Venus mission is gone, more are on the books. But some of them are hanging by a thread, as they depend on NASA support at a time when the agency is facing unprecedented budget cuts. The Trump administration proposed a 24% reduction to the agency's fiscal 2026 budget, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. While the U.S. House of Represen