A reason to go to Mars

Of course, you don't really need soil in order to grow food. You could
grow food on Mars hydroponically.

I look a Phobos and Deimos as simply low 'gravity well' resources for
the materials needed for the construction of O'Neill type colonies.
Since I consider the moons of Mars as 'natural wonders', I would only
want an extremely tiny portion of each moon ultimately exploited for
resources and colony building. Since Phobos weighs 10 trillion tonnes,
just 0.1% of its mass (10 billion tonnes) would be needed to build ten
full scale (billion tonne) O'Neill type cylindrical colonies.

Marcel F. Williams

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Kevin Burgess"