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 This
is my kind a Mars mission. No pussy footing about with space
stations, ion drives, gliders, orbital assemblies, or any of that
other namby pamby rubbish. Just get in your ship, light the blue
touch paper and go to Mars.
The Deimos project,
conceived by Philip Bono of the Douglas Aircraft Company, was a late
'60s idea for reaching the planet Mars using a single ship. This
wasn't to be some Apollo variant that broke away in stages. This
was to be a modified ROMBUS* with a habitat ring and a landing module
bolted on for good measure.
The Deimos ship was supposed to lift into Earth
orbit with a crew of six in 1986, where it would top off its fuel
tanks and then proceed to Mars. On reaching the red planet, the
landing module, which looked rather like an oversized Apollo command module,
would leave the mother ship and land for a twenty day recce of the
surface before the crew used the ascent module in the nose of the lander to return to
the mother ship and then back to Earth for the usual tickertape parade
830 days after departure. And since the mother ship
is reusable, the only thing you're out is a landing module, some
expendable fuel tanks dumped off on the way to Mars, and half a ton of
dehydrated shrimp cocktail, so
you can go and do it all over again as soon as the mood takes you.
*Reusable Orbital Module-Booster &
Utility Shuttle: a single-stage spaceship capable of reaching Earth
orbit and then returning under its own power. It's basically a
giant version of Bono's
SASSTO.
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