Mining the Moons of Mars

"sailor.barsoom"
>
> Well OK, but wouldn't it be even more convenient for the
> Deimos-miners to live in a spinning one-G habitat located,
> say, a hundred Km away from Deimos? The material for the
> pressure shell could come from Deimos itself and mass less
> than a thousand tons, with the tailings from platinum mining
> making up the radiation shield.
>

You'd have to build a huge 2 kilometer in diameter 1-G habitat first
before you shielded it which would be extremely expensive.

But you could pretty much get the mining facilities going on Phobos
and Deimos by living in small prefabricated structures on the Martian
moons shielded by the materials on those moons and on the surface of
Mars with perhaps just a few dozen or a few hundred people.

That doesn't mean that large rotational habitats with hundreds or
perhaps thousands of people will not eventually appear in orbit around
Mars. But we should try to get things going as cheaply as possible as
soon as possible.

Marcel F. Williams