Scientists propose to fly to Mars not directly, but through a "transfer" on the Moon, which will significantly reduce the requirements for the capacity of the tanks of the spacecraft flying to Mars and accelerate the dispatch of the first colonists and travelers to the Red Planet.
MOSCOW, October 15 - RIA Novosti. The construction of a special refueling station on the Moon or its orbit could significantly reduce the requirements for the capacity of the tanks of a spacecraft flying to Mars, and speed up the dispatch of the first colonists and travelers to the Red Planet, according to scientists who published an article in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.
“Our ultimate goal is colonization and the creation of a permanent and self-sustaining human population on Mars. To do this, we need, figuratively speaking, to pave a road through space to Mars, which would allow us to travel to Mars cheaply. Our colleagues used to think that a stop on the moon could make this journey cheaper, but we were the first to prove this statement mathematically,”said Olivier de Weck of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
De Hueck and his colleagues have shown that building a “fuel station” on the Moon and extracting fuel components from its depths can reduce the mass of a spacecraft flying to Mars by 68% and save a huge amount of resources, money and time by calculating the effectiveness of several hundred possible scenarios flight to Mars.
Now, according to de Hueck, NASA plans to send the first expedition to Mars on a direct route, continuously moving from Earth to Mars. As shown by his group's calculations, this is a very sub-optimal solution.
It turned out that the fastest way to reach Mars is by traveling to it through several stops and using the resources that a person can extract from the bowels of other planets and from the void of the solar system.
De Hueck's group proposes to launch a spacecraft from Earth with minimal fuel reserves and direct them not to Mars, but to a stable orbit in the vicinity of the Moon. When it arrives at a satellite of the Earth, the lunar "fueling station" will send several tanks of fuel into space, which will be depleted from the lunar regolith and the reserves of water ice that occurs in dark craters on the moon's surface.
Some of these tanks, along with other reserves of lunar resources, as mathematicians suggest, can be launched into the void between Mars and Earth in advance, several years or months before the start of the journey, which will allow the spacecraft to "refuel" along the way, picking them up.
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Adopting such a strategy to prepare for a flight to Mars could save tens of billions of dollars and accelerate the flight to the red planet, which is now slated for mid-2030, by several years, scientists said.
