Solar & Mars Landing
Where we land

Landing spots

by Joe Miller

Every good landing spot needs the same three things: flat ground, sunlight for power, and ice for water, air and rocket fuel. That is also exactly what a self-copying robot factory would need.

The Moon: Shackleton Crater, south pole

ice in thedark floorShackleton CraterBase on the sunny rimRim: sunlight almost all the timeSouth pole
The base goes on the sunny rim; the ice sits in the crater floor, which has not seen sunlight in billions of years.
What it needsWhy here
SunlightPeaks on the rim are lit almost all the time, good for solar power before the reactor arrives.
IceThe permanently dark crater floor holds frozen water, which can become drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel.
GroundFlat enough nearby for landing and building, and close enough to the ice to mine it.
WhoNASA's Moon base, with crewed landings planned from 2028. China's robot missions are headed to the south pole too.

Mars: Arcadia Planitia and its neighbors

Arcadia PlanitiaAmazonis PlanitiaOlympus MonsJezero CraterGale CraterHellas BasinGold: SpaceX Starship candidate areas. Blue: NASA rovers on Mars today. A simple drawing, not to scale.NORTHSOUTH
SpaceX asked NASA's HiRISE camera team to photograph nine candidate sites; eight lie along the border of Arcadia and Amazonis Planitia.
What it needsWhy here
Ice just under the groundLow northern plains with signs of shallow buried ice, the raw material for water and fuel.
Flat and boulder-freeBoulders can tip a landing ship.
Low and sunnyLow elevation means more air to slow the ship; mid-latitudes get more sun than the poles.
Fuel on siteStarship burns methane and oxygen. On Mars, ice plus carbon dioxide from the air can make both, using a 1890s chemistry trick called the Sabatier reaction.
ScoutingNASA's Skyfall helicopters, planned for 2028, will fly over possible landing zones for astronauts.

Stepping stones beyond Mars

Phobos and Deimos

Mars's two tiny moons. Almost no gravity, so launching from them takes very little fuel.

The asteroid belt

Metal and rock floating free between Mars and Jupiter, the classic place for robot mining and for von Neumann probes to build copies.

Ceres

The largest body in the asteroid belt, rich in ice.

Moons of Jupiter and Saturn

Europa and Enceladus hide oceans under ice; Titan has a thick atmosphere and lakes of methane, ready-made rocket fuel.

These are ideas scientists discuss, not scheduled missions. See how self-copying probes could hop from world to world.

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Sources