Word: fuel
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...thornier than the design of the spacecraft is the problem posed by all the fuel, food and water such a mission would require. The Apollo flights to the moon were gas-up-and-go trips that lasted no more than 12 days. You could fill the tank and the larder once before you left and carry along everything you would need. Not so when you're looking at 14 months of round-trip flight time between Earth and Mars and perhaps a 1 1/2-year stay on the planet to catch the next Earth-Mars alignment back home. Even...
...what it means for the possibility of Martian life. Martian water, once purified, ought to be as useful for drinking and bathing as earthly water. What's more, since water is merely hydrogen and oxygen and since it's hydrogen that provides the propulsive fire in some liquid-fuel engines and oxygen that keeps those flames burning, breaking the two elements apart in a Mars-based fuel distillery could provide everything necessary to refill the tanks of a spacecraft once it arrives on the Red Planet. Oxygen produced on Mars could also be used as breathable atmosphere...
...scenario," says John Hoffman, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas who is working on a 2007 Mars probe, "is to send rockets up two years before people go, then robotically make water for an 18-month stay and fuel for the return. Only when it's 100% done do you send humans." For mission planners--not to mention astronauts--spooked by the idea of arriving on Mars and finding that the fuel and water tanks have sprung a leak, redundant tanks could store twice as much as needed and provide some margin of safety...
...possible to make fuel, air and water on-site, it is also possible to grow food. Mars has plenty of soil, and if chemical samplers like those aboard Spirit prove that Mars dust isn't poisonous, it would be a relatively straightforward job to assemble a greenhouse-like enclosure, raise the temperature, pump up the atmosphere and plant a few seeds. Donald Henninger, a NASA chief scientist, has identified 13 crops that could thrive in a space habitat, including wheat, potatoes, soybeans and salad greens. "You can take stored food along, but how long does it last?" he asks...
...fact that solar power isn't yet cost effective on Earth makes this high-tech scenario seem a bit farfetched. The same goes for another energy-producing idea: extracting helium-3, an isotope rare on Earth but relatively abundant on the lunar surface, and shipping it back to fuel nuclear-fusion power plants. First, though, somebody would have to demonstrate that fusion reactors actually work...