If Star Wars’ cloud city Bespin captured your imagination as a child, NASA’s tentative plans for an airship-laden, manned mission to Venus may trigger pangs of nostalgia and wonder.

Although currently unfunded, the project is known as the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, more informally called HAVOC. The plan: penetrate the planet’s atmosphere with blimps, which will hover 30 miles above the lead-melting surface, using helium to stay afloat.

NASA has landed equipment on Venus before, but none of it lasted more than a few hours in the face of oppressive conditions, according to Space.com. With a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth, clouds of sulfuric acid pock the skies and a landscape riddled with thousands of volcanoes, it’s easy to understand why HAVOC aims to populate the planet’s airspace as opposed to the ground.

Christopher A. Jones, aerospace engineer at NASA, claims that “the atmosphere of Venus is an exciting destination for both further scientific study and future human exploration,” according to CNN.

The plan, which may take decades to get off the ground, would begin with preliminary robotic missions, escalating to short 30-day manned missions and perhaps eventual colonization.

One approach would equip astronauts with a vehicle that houses a habitat and a bevy of probes, providing a platform for the researches to learn more about Venus.

The logistics of HAVOC present a number of challenges to scientists, namely decelerating an airship as it hurtles through Venus’ atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour, and unfolding the blimp as it reaches its desired altitude with mechanical technology.

Jones adds, “Eventually a short duration human mission would allow us to gain experience having humans live at another world, with the hope that it would someday be possible to live in an atmosphere permanently.”

Some speculate that HAVOC is a testing ground for a future manned Mars mission due to Venus’ close proximity to Earth.

“The atmosphere of Venus is an exciting destination for both further scientific study and future human exploration,” explains the engineer.