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Why Mars Instead of the Moon?
Maybe I am influenced by having read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when it was first published, but I am wondering about all the recent PR for a manned mission to Mars — even by some people who are not named Robert Zubrin — and whether it is just the romance of going to another planet. The Moon seems to make much more sense for a first permanent base (i.e. not an orbital space station) for a number of reasons:
- It’s closer.
- There is micro-gravity.
- If you go underground, you might be in decent shape for protection against high energy particles.
- There appears to be water ice in some of the craters.
- Mining on the Moon might, or might not, be worth the effort of going there. (Isn’t a useful isotope of Hydrogen available on the Moon and not on Earth?)
- The Moon, being out of the deepest part of Earth’s gravity well is, from a propulsion energy perspective, about halfway to anywhere in the inner solar system.
So what are the arguments in favor of Mars and against the Moon, besides “been there, done that?”
Published in Science & Technology
I suggest we enlist a group of religious fanatics (if they’re escaping persecution, all the better!) who would accept a 50% die-off rate as a reasonable price for freedom and the chance to set the tone for a new civilization. I bet we could find some Amish somewhere, or maybe some Russian Old Believers.
Give them a creaky old spaceship, call it the Mayflower, aim them toward Mars, and see how they do.
I don’t see why food production is an issue. If you had controlled transmutation, you could turn rocks into whatever you needed.
Oh wait, I hear it now.
I don’t get the argument that we can’t produce enough food. We have become extremely good at hydroponic farming, and lunar regolith can be used for soil farming – especially if mixed with manure. A pressurized lava tube could hold thousands of acres of crops. Energy is abundant, especially if provided from nuclear power. There is plenty of water easily available. So where is the problem? Yes at first we would have to supplement food and other materials, but a path to sustainability seems feasible. Supplementing food on Mars would be much more difficult than doing so on the moon.
The fuel cost for landing a kg of mass on the moon is about $500. All the rest of the cost is in the hardware we throw away and the support costs of the launch infrastructure. With reusable rockets it seems feasible to get down to a price of maybe $1000/kg to put mass on the moon. At those prices, we could afford to supplement a small colony with nitrogen and other required equipment for a long time. At that price, a billion dollars would let you put a million kg of mass on the moon.
This assumes a completely reusable transportation infastructure – lunar transfer vehicles from orbit to the surface, perhaps reusable earth/moon shuttles, etc. In the near term we wouldn’t have all rhat, somthe cost would be much higher. But part of the reason for doing this on the moon is to learn howvtomdevelopmthat kind of capability before we go out to Mars and beyond.
When we’re not all arguing about sex, this is one hell of an intelligent group.
A word about Elon Musk and SpaceX. I admire what he’s done; it is a jaw-dropping story. If I don’t cheer even louder than anyone else, it’s a bit of Elon Fatigue; SpaceX fanboys can sometimes resemble the fans of Apple, or Howard Stern.
Everything that visionary conservatives say about private launch is true. But guys, a little perspective. Rockwell, Boeing, General Dynamics, the old McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, IBM: the tools have always been built by American industry. “Old” space wasn’t cobbled together in government armories.
I think you’ve raised a very important issue.