[boris]

"The moon doesn?t have enough atmosphere,"

The Martian atmosphere is 1/100 the pressure of Earth. About 8 torr, what we would call a decent vacuum in a high-school lab. About the same pressure as Earth?s atmosphere at an altitude of 100,000 feet. It is mostly CO2, and very tenuous. It does little to stop big rocks from hitting Mars.

Mars? gravity is about 0.37 g, whereas the Moon is about half of Mars', one-sixth of Earth's.

Temperatures on Mars can reach 100 below zero, and the presence of even the thin atmosphere can chill your hardware very rapidly.

--Boris

[discostu]

But the moon's atmosphere does less. Just gotta look at the pictures of the surfaces, the moon takes a regular pounding from every piece of crap in the system. Mars get's hit, hell Earth get's hit, but it's not as bad (still bad, not AS bad). Also Mars is in a better spot in the gravity well, space junk flocks to Earth and the moon shields us pretty well.

The punchline is we'll have to try it on the moon first, but Mars needs to be the goal, then Io. Then out of the system completely.