Step outside on a clear night and stare up into the sky. At this time of year, in the constellation Capricorn, you may see a small red dot. Can you see it? That is the planet Mars.

    Our infatuation with the Red Planet is probably as old as humanity as a reasoning species. The first people who made a systematic examination of the heavens noticed that it was one of just five lights in the sky that did not move in the same way as all of the others. The word "planet" originates from the Greek for “wanderer.” Writers and dreamers have imagined Mars as an abode of life—friendly, hostile, or indifferent—since the 19th century.

     Mars is Earth's nearest cousin, not only in distance, but also in size and character. Its equatorial radius is about 53 percent of Earth's. Its gravity is about 38 percent of ours. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, completely inadequate to support terrestrial life, but schemes to terraform it have been dreamed for more than a century. It features a canyon, Valles Marineris, almost four times as deep and ten times as long as Earth’s Grand Canyon. Its mighty volcano, Olympus Mons, is nearly three times the height of Mount Everest, with a diameter at the base approximately 15 times Everest's ("Mars/Earth Comparison Table"). Small wonder that we are fascinated with the planet

    Small wonder, also, that Mars has been the target of proposed manned missions, some speculative and some serious proposals by NASA or other official agencies of governments around the world. SpaceX, the private corporation that has already sent vehicles to rendezvous with the International Space Station, has a strategy for a Mars mission as well. In 2016, President Barack Obama, in an op-ed piece written for CNN, echoed President Kennedy’s 1962 speech launching the Moon mission this way: "We
have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time" (Obama).

    In the Spring 2018 issue of The Torch, Professor Charles Darling of the Youngstown Torch Club published an excellent paper in which he expressed his belief that a manned mission to Mars will happen, and happen within this century. He made an excellent case that this is the logical, even inevitable, next step in humankind’s exploration of the Solar System. And I believe that he is probably right.

    But is Mars the best destination for our next space efforts? There are reasons to think that it is not.

    Next out from Mars, as planets go, is mighty Jupiter, king planet of the Solar System. Human feet may never stand on Jupiter; its heavy gravity and the weight of atmosphere at surface level would crush us. But between Mars and Jupiter, a literal gold mine awaits us: the Main Asteroid Belt.

    The Main Asteroid Belt orbits the Sun at a distance about two-and-a-half times the distance of Earth from the Sun. It is made up of at least billions, perhaps trillions, of rocks floating in orbit. Some of these rocks are tiny. And some are huge. Vesta, the largest, is 329 miles long, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to San Jose, California.

    Why go to the asteroids, especially in preference to Mars? The answer is simple: money. Going to the asteroids will be less costly and potentially much more rewarding.

    The limiting factor in future space missions will not be distance. Nor, probably, will it be time. A trip to Mars presents serious challenges to today’s state of the art as far as long-term life support capacity is concerned, but these are largely issues of industriallevel research and development, not a problem requiring a major new scientific discovery. Any life support capability that will get us as far as Mars will almost certainly be good enough to get us to the Main Asteroid Belt. The limiting factor will be thrust, and here, the asteroids present an obvious advantage over Mars.

    Thrust is the mechanical force produced when mass is expelled from a vehicle in one direction, moving the vehicle in the other. In aircraft operating in the atmosphere, the mass used is air, propelled backwards by a jet engine or a propeller. In a rocket, the mass is a gas generated by the combustion of fuel. The drawback for a rocket is that, unlike the aircraft, it must carry the mass along with it as well as (or in the form of) the fuel to make it move (“What Is Thrust?”).

    Some day in the distant future, humankind may be able to build ships that can provide a constant boost, accelerating or decelerating throughout the entire trip. But we do not know how to do that, yet, and although it would make a trip to Mars—or the asteroids—a much quicker proposition, it is not something we need to wait for. All that we must have is sufficient thrust to leave the surface of the Earth and Earth orbit, and enough to slow down when we reach our destination. Thanks to Newton's First Law, the trip in between  is essentially free. Interplanetary space is practically free of gravity and friction, and therefore requires no expenditure of energy once motion has begun. Thrust can be expended to speed the journey, but must be paid for with an equal thrust to slow at the other end.

    Planet Earth has a "gravity well" of 11.186 kilometers per second, a little over twenty-five thousand miles per hour ("Escape Velocity"). In other words, any object leaving our planet must reach this speed, or it will eventually fall back to Earth. Before a spaceship can go to the Moon, or to Mars, or anywhere else, it must generate enough thrust to reach this speed. This is why the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo Program had to be so huge; they needed to produce a lot of thrust to bring their payloads—the astronauts and all their equipment—to this speed. And this is before one erg of energy can be expended to move
a spaceship on to its destination.

    Similarly, thrust must be generated to control the fall of a landing ship, unless the target has an atmosphere thick enough to slow it. Fortunately for our Apollo astronauts, Earth has such an atmosphere. In fact, the problem with returning to Earth from space is shedding enough energy without incinerating the returnees. But in landing on the Moon, which has no atmosphere, a great deal of thrust is required to fight gravity in order to control the landing.

   Mars is, as we noted, smaller than Earth, and has a gravity only 38 percent of Earth's. Therefore, it has a correspondingly lower escape velocity, 5.03 kilometers per second. But while Mars has more of an atmosphere than our Moon, it is not sufficient to assist in slowing a landing on the planet. So just as in Project Apollo, a craft landing on Mars must expend thrust to control a landing, thrust produced from fuel that must be carried  with it all the way from our home planet. And energy must be expended to move that fuel from Earth to Mars, and even more energy will be needed to fight Mars’s weaker "gravity well" when it is time for that mission to go home.

    There are strategies to ameliorate these difficulties somewhat, such as sending life support supplies for the mission and the fuel for departure in separate ships from the human explorers. There is even the possibility of manufacturing escape fuel on Mars from Martian resources, but this latter possibility is still speculative.

    The bodies in the Main Asteroid Belt do not share this handicap. Even the largest body in the belt is not massive enough to produce a gravity field requiring a serious amount of thrust to overcome. Indeed, "landing" on an asteroid will more closely resemble rendezvousing with another spacecraft, as our Apollo astronauts did when returning from the surface of the moon, than it will landing on a substantial planet.

    So, if we assume that the technological difficulties of extended spaceflight will eventually be solved (and projects like the current International Space Station have been making progress in these areas for years), then the asteroids will actually be easier to get to than Mars is.

    But why bother? What is there in the Main Asteroid Belt that is worth the time, effort, and expense to go see? The answer is, "Real, tangible wealth."

    Many of the asteroids to be found in the belt are extremely rich in valuable metals. One such is 16 Psyche, a roughly ellipsoid asteroid with a mean diameter of approximately 223 kilometers, or just under 140 miles. The surface of this body appears to be roughly 90% metallic, iron and some nickel. The iron content of 16 Psyche has been estimated to be worth ten-thousand-quadrillion dollars. That's a one followed by zeroes. But as they in the infomercials, "Wait, there's more!  16 Psyche also contains smaller, but significant, amounts of "impurities," impurities which, in this case, include gold, platinum, copper, cobalt, and iridium (Didymus). An unmanned, purely scientific mission is planned by NASA to depart in the summer of 2022 and arrive at 16 Psyche in 2026. NASA has no plans for exploitation of the asteroid—yet!—but private companies are already setting their sights on other mineral-rich asteroids, some of which have orbits that bring them closer to Earth (Murphy).

    16 Psyche is so large that any future mining operations would likely be conducted in situ, without attempting to alter the orbit of the body. But other, smaller, asteroids might more profitably be moved into Earth orbit and mined there. One such proposed scenario would send a mission, manned or possibly unmanned, to a suitable asteroid to build a pilot mining operation on it. Materials from the asteroid would then be used to build a linear accelerator, an electrical device that ejects mass from the body into space. The accelerator would be powered with either a nuclear or solar generator, and the unwanted
tailings from the mining would be used for reaction mass. Useful materials, such as metals, would be stockpiled.

    While the metallic asteroids are in many ways the most exciting, based on the composition of meteorites hitting Earth, other asteroids in the belt are rich in hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. These, of course, are the basic building blocks of life. In the long run, it may very well become possible to supply space operations more easily and cheaply from these sources than by lifting those materials from the surface of the Earth.

    It goes without saying that any future space operations will be extremely expensive, although based on our experience in the 1960s with the Moon Race, such an expense is a relative drop in the bucket of total government spending. But wouldn't it be so much nicer if our operations in space could pay for themselves? Deriving resources from space itself could not only achieve that, but also multiply the wealth of the human race and help lead to a better, richer life for billions of people. It could also enable us to move destructive or polluting operations off the surface of the planet and help reduce the destructive footprint of the species.
 
    The Libertarian in me hastens to add that one should not assume that commercial development will be done under governmental auspices. Private companies will probably do the work in the long run, even if the first steps are undertaken by states. Think of the Honourable Virginia Company.

    I want to take just a moment to address one issue raised in one of my source materials. An article from The Sun, one of the UK's leading newspapers, is headlined "Space Gold Rush: NASA announces 2022 mission to explore metal asteroid so valuable it could crash the world economy"(Murphy). In my opinion, as an amateur student of economics, the notion that adding significant new natural resource wealth could crash the world's economy is nonsense. Yes, the sudden addition of extremely large amounts of new metals would most likely set off some significant readjustment; existing metals industrieswould be hit hard, and the increase in real wealth could set off a deflation of the currency.

    My fellow Libertarians' dreams of a precious metals-based money supply would probably be destroyed, once and for all. But asteroid mining will not happen overnight. Businesses and individuals will have known that this new source of metals would be about to open up years before the first ingot lands on Earth, and will have plenty of time to prepare. And deflation would mean a sharp decrease in the prices of many, many products, and, in my opinion, a generally better standard of living in general. For the life of me, I can't see how more real wealth can be anything but beneficial in the long run.

    Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the famous early Russian rocketry pioneer, famously said, "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever."  Butin looking for that quote, I also found this one: "Mankind will not forever remain on Earth but, in the pursuit of light and space, will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space" (Brainyquote.com).

    In my opinion, humankind has only two possible futures. One is the wonderful vision that Tsiolkovsky envisions; the other is the extinction scenario that was outlined by Thomas Malthus. If we are to avoid that terrible fate, we will need the resources of space, and we will need to access them as efficiently as possible.

    Mars will always be there, in our sky. One day, we will go there. We will explore, and some of us may even live there. If Professor Darling is correct, and frankly, his scenario is the way to bet, we'll go there first, and we'll spend billions of dollars in doing it, without much direct return other than in unquestionably-valuable knowledge. I remain as anxious as anyone to find out in greater detail what awaits us there. But if we were to follow the scenario I have outlined here, we'd still get there, perhaps not as quickly. But
when we did get there, the bills would be paid.

    John Fockler is one of the magazine's most faithful contributors. By our reckoning, this is his fifteenth appearance in our pages.

    He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Colgate University. A "lifer" in the hotel industry, he has managed properties in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

    He has been an official of the Libertarian Party in Ohio, and is currently serving as a member of the state central committee. That activism has been influenced by his lifelong interest in matters historical and economic, and, in turn, has informed his view of such issues.

    Fockler and his wife, Cathy, are the parents of two daughters and grandparents of three grandsons. He has been a member of Torch since the late 1990s, and is a past president of both the Youngstown and Akron Torch Clubs."

    "Skipping Mars" was presented to the Youngstown Torch Club on September 18, 2017.

     The author can be contacted at jkf573@aol.com