This week’s The Space Review features some truly excellent thinking about space. In addition to a great piece explaining how the Vision for Space Exploration’s return to the Moon is much more than just another Apollo, Jeff Foust discusses the suggestion that a manned mission to Phobos could be a next step on our way to Mars.
Foust reports on a plan suggested by Pascal Lee, co-founder of the Mars Institute and head of the Houghton Mars Project on Devon Island. Lee is also an associate editor at the new, online, free, peer-reviewed Mars Journal. I had the chance to meet Pascal this summer while at the Mars Society’s FMARS. I was impressed by his dedication to Martian science, and by the progress that has been made, in large part, because of his efforts. The manned mission to Phobos has a host of reasons why it is or is not better than an actual landing on Mars, but there are, as I see it, two primary distinctions between the two:
1) A manned mission to Phobos will require much less technology development. Provided that the Vision for Space Exploration is successful, and humans return to the moon sometime in a decade or so, we will already have almost everything we need for the Phobos mission. We needn’t develop new landers, spacesuits, or in-situ propellant production. We could fly some astronauts there, have them bounce around for a few months, then return them using the same hardware (almost) as we’ve used on the Moon.
2) Phobos lacks an atmosphere, gravity, and native resources that would all lend success to a manned Martian mission. On Mars, the atmosphere and (localized) magnetic field provide some shielding against radiation and solar flares. The gravity on Mars may be enough to stave-off bone decay and other health problems due to weightlessness, while Phobos’s will probably not (though non-earth gravity environments are so poorly studied, we don’t know for sure). Finally, the water ice and carbon dioxide on Mars can be used to manufacture propellant for the return-journey, thus reducing launch weight and increasing the mass available to scientific instruments and supplies. Thus a mission to Phobos will inevitably be shorter and marginally (in the economic sense) more expensive.
Those two points aside, the discussion of the relative merits of each mission serves only to highlight the merits of exploration in general. The Space Review is an excellent opinion journal that receives my full attention for a few hours each and every Monday.
