Let's put Mars off for a while

Let's put Mars off for a while

First published nearly 20 years ago, the arguments put forth in Eric Drexler's The Case Against Mars still hold true today.

While in general I support President Bush's new vision for NASA, that support is chiefly because he has given NASA a direction at all. I don't necessarily agree with the direction, but some direction is much better than continually going around in circles.

A moon base, definitely. Rather than immediately going for Mars though, the next step must be an expansion of the toehold on the moon, developing a multi-use facility capable of much more than just being a scientific research outpost. It must also be a mining base and a tourist destination. From there it must continue to grow, adding an electromagnetic launcher for sending material from the moon to earth orbit. The raw material would then be processed in orbit into such things as space stations and solar power satellites.

From there, we still should not go to the surface of Mars. Instead our next main area of concern would be asteroids. Two types of asteroids merit consideration: the near-earth asteroids and then all the others. There are several hundred near earth asteroids already catalogued, and a mission or two to those to set up and test mining facilities etc. makes sense.

Clearly, we will not be exploring all asteroids before moving on to a target like Mars. However, a mission to Phobos and/or Deimos makes sense; as captured asteroids, operations which take place on them would be the same as operations on asteroids, and being in Mars orbit helps to save fuel for the return trip (use Mars gravity to an advantage for a "gravity boost"). It is only after completion of missions to the moons of Mars that a manned landing on Mars ought to be considered.

Following the outline above, sufficient infrastructure would exist both on earth and in earth orbit to permit a great many missions, including manned Mars missions, for a fraction of the cost of an Apollo-style flag's'n'footprints mission.

addendum, april 30th: a base at L1, the Lagrange orbit about 90% of the way to the moon, is a wise idea. Such an orbit would likely hold two or three space stations, at most, mutually orbiting each other around the L1 point. Such a base would be built concurrently with the moon base. The first station would be quite small, likely launched either all at once or in two rothree launches. It would be just big enough to assist in the construction of the moon base, operating as an orbiting fuel station and serving as a docking point for both a lunar lander and the CEV that would bring astronauts either from earth or earth orbit to L1. As the moon base grows, so would the L1 station, and eventually a second station, probably much larger and wheel-shaped, would be built to handle the increase in traffic. The first station would thus serve as a construction shack for the second.