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.With a new generation of engineers agitating for private space missions, the U.S.government had finallyauthorized a few incentives for private space work.A series of prizes had been established for achievingcertain space-travel goals, with a general eye towards eventually reaching Mars.The prizes involved were mere pittances, needless to say, from the point of view of most governmentagencies and megacorporations.But they were large enough to warrant an attempt by moderate-sizedconsortia of interested organizations.The idea itself had its genesis in Robert Zubrin s The Case ForMars, and the Ares Project had been formed to seize the opportunity.Many of the founders were, ofcourse, the same people who had hounded the government into arranging the prizes.Collectively, thegroup had gained the nickname of the Nuts That Roared, for their Grand Fenwickian victory over theponderous and generally unswervable inertia of official space programs.The public had started to take notice when the Ares Project successfully orbited, de-orbited, andretrieved a fully-functional man-capable space module and did it for a million dollars less than the prizemoney for that achievement.But it was the follow-on Ares-2, a smaller but fully-automated sensingsatellite, that galvanized public opinion.The completely privately constructed spacecraft reached the RedPlanet, used aerobraking to achieve orbital velocity, and sent back multiple high-quality images.And didit at a smaller cost than any equivalent government probe to date.Stung into high gear by these successes, the politicians had showered money onto the space program.NASA and its associated partner agencies suddenly found themselves with quadrupled budgets and amandate to get a manned spacecraft to Mars and the unspoken mandate to manage the task before theAres Project beat them to it.Politics and government approaches still influenced the work at NASA, of course, and part of thatcaused NASA to avoid using many of the approaches which Ares used.This suited members of theProject, like A.J., just fine mostly.If NASA decided to copy their methods, it might well outdo theProject despite its current lead.For A.J. s purposes, one important way in which they had taken a lesson from the Project was to avoidwhat Zubrin had called the  Siren Call of the moon; i.e., to see the establishment of a moon base as anecessary precursor to a Mars expedition.The important way in which they had not taken that lessonwas politically connected.The moonbase faction had been persuaded to give up on a Luna base, and acompromise reached: that a base would be constructed on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars.This was not something the Ares Project was directly interested in, but it made a lot more sense thanbuilding a base on Earth s moon.Phobos had no gravity well to speak of, and aerobraking in Marsatmosphere could help in achieving a matched orbit at a reasonable cost.That done, the closeness of themoonlet would allow excellent surveying of parts of Mars.Better still, there had been some indications from prior probes, including the ill-fated Soviet Phobos 2,that there might be some fossil deposits of water on Phobos, which was over twenty kilometers wide.That wasn t really surprising, since both Phobos and its brother moon Deimos were suspected to becaptured outer-system bodies, possibly the cores of former comets.So the Phobos project wasjustifiable on its own terms while still being reasonably well integrated into NASA s overall missiondesign.And always a critical factor in the world inhabited by government agencies and themegacorporations with whom they maintained an incestuous relationship the Phobos project kept theexisting vested interests happy.A moonbase, after all, was a moonbase, regardless of what moon it wason.It was here that A.J.had seen an opportunity.Obviously, no one neither government regulatoryagencies nor private insurance companies was going to let the Ares Project blast human beings intospace without firm proof that all aspects of the proposed system would work safely.Pirate was anunmanned device designed to demonstrate the most critical aspects of the system: to be able to travel tothe Red Planet with no return fuel, just a small store of  seed hydrogen; to be able to create fuel fromMars atmosphere; and then return to Earth using Mars-manufactured propellant.A rover unit was to be deployed during the atmospheric fuel manufacturing stage to do surveying of thearea, which was one of the prime locations currently considered for final landing of a manned mission.Itwould also leave the first  hab  habitable enclosure on Mars, although it was a scaled-down versionfrom the full-scale  tuna cans in the forthcoming main prep flights.The  hab would serve as a testbedfor the long-term operation of some of the systems and as a radio beacon as well.A.J.had proposed a modification of this mission profile which would serve NASA s interests and that ofthe Ares Project: instead of immediately landing, Pirate would aerobrake into an orbit close to that ofPhobos, and would release a number of independent, remotely controllable sensor probe units.Theprobes would survey Phobos carefully from all directions in a number of spectra, helping them to selectthe best places for NASA s base.Pirate would then de-orbit and carry out its basic mission [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]