supporting, or, better yet, ultimately to make a profit, the whole concept becomes considerably more attractive. To make a profit, the colony must have something of value to export. Choosing the initial landing site should be done with this in mind. If this were not a requirement, and the goal was just to get people and supplies straight to the Martian surface, then the mission plan becomes clear: all you need is a crew module, an aerobrake, and one propulsive stage. The propulsive stage puts you in MTO (Mars Transfer Orbit). Upon arrival, rather than going into orbit around Mars, the vehicle just uses its aerobrake, along with a big parachute and braking rockets, and lands. Once down, however, you are there to stay. Although our colonists are willing to accept risks, we do not need to ask quite this much of them. The Soviet Mars landers used this method and, unfortunately for them, there was a planet-wide dust storm going on at the time. From an economic point of view, Phobos and Deimos are much more attractive than the Martian surface. The delta-v required to send cargo to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) from Demios is significantly less than from Mars (even less than the delta-v required to send cargo from the surface of the Moon—see Fig. 1), and it may have plenty of useful resources (assuming it is essentially a C-type asteroid, as all the evidence seems to indicate), such as water, nickel, and iron [1, 2, 3]. These resources could be used as propellant, life support supplies, shielding, insulation, armour, etc. Furthermore, these resources can be exported back to LEO and sold for a profit [4, 5], More on this later. Of the two, Deimos was chosen, because it is in almost continual sunlight, whereas Phobos is eclipsed every few hours.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==