But Earth had not put all its eggs in a single basket. Russia, China, Japan, India, and the United States opted to implement their own fast-track space programs, and the European Space Agency chose to partner with a cadre of technologically advanced countries which lacked the capacity to develop their own space programs in order to exponentially expand the International Space Station with the capacity to house upwards of 1,200 people chosen by a complicated system from each of the partner nations. China, India, and Japan opted to implement variations on a theme of Moon colonies consisting primarily of inflatable habitats that could be created and sent aloft quickly and, once on the Moon, easily inflated and connected by a network of airlocks. The largest of these resembled the familiar domed design of indoor tennis courts.

All three colonies were planned in close proximity to the limited water on the Polar Regions that would be mined and used to extract both water and oxygen for the colonies’ use. Eventually, they would have to find new sources of water, or they would perish, but the readily available water above ground would serve the needs of a modest colony of several hundred people for many years, along with the normal water reclamation processes in place that in a closed environment could recycle better than 90 percent of the water in human waste. Three different colonies, albeit small ones, competing for a finite resource would create some conflicts that the colonists would have to resolve. But there was simply no alternative. The available resources of each country were put to use with abandon towards launching as many payloads as possible into space in the available time.

The U.S. took a different tack, in part to avoid the inevitable conflict it could foresee with too many colonists competing for a very limited resource—frozen water. Moreover, the only type of habitats that could and would to be used on the Moon with the available technology were not sustainable on a long-term basis. They would offer little protection from solar radiation, and none against meteorites given the Moon’s practically non-existent atmosphere that makes it a veritable shooting gallery in comparison to Earth. For these reasons in part, and perhaps also in part as a final effort to showcase its technical superiority, the U.S. chose to send a crew of twelve--six men and six women--to Mars instead. While this choice offered many challenges, it also provided important practical advantages for the long-term survival of a colony. Mars has a significant atmosphere by Moon if not by Earth standards made up primarily of Carbon Dioxide that could be reclaimed with existing technology to provide all the oxygen, hydrogen, water, and methane needed to fuel the energy needs of a colony indefinitely. The reclamation systems could be housed in cylindrical containers about the same size as an ordinary home water heater that obtained all of its power from solar cells assisted by a small nuclear-powered generator. One of these could provide enough oxygen, water, and methane to meet the daily minimum needs of colonists. But they would have three of these to serve as spares along with the best water and air reclamation systems that money can buy--assuming that they survived the trip and could be brought down in one piece from Mars orbit. Cost was not an issue. Maximizing the chance of survival for the tiny colony was.

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If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then no other time in history has ever provided a greater impetus to inventiveness since the dawn of civilization. With less than two years to come up with a plan, a laughably small window to launch even a routine unmanned planetary mission, the options open to the best minds that NASA and private aerospace companies could muster were limited. When the decision was made to go to Mars rather than the more accessible space station or lunar colony options, a plan of action was quickly developed to press into service three of the mothballed space shuttles for one final mission. Herculean efforts were made to get all three to the Kennedy space Center in Florida and readied with the necessary modifications that would allow the three shuttles to be linked in orbit into a serviceable space vehicle and long-term makeshift space station in geostatic orbit around Mars’s equator above an extensive cave system detected by ground penetrating radar surveys thought to be the remnants of old lava tubes from ancient volcanic activity, or perhaps long-dry underground rivers that had millennia ago fed a massive lake.

These underground natural tunnels were destined to become the colonists’ new home, sealed from the surface, and divided by a series of ingenious airlocks that would allow sections of any desired length to serve as a serviceable, expandable habitat offering perfect protection from solar radiation, smaller meteor strikes and the massive Martian dust storms that could make life on the surface difficult, even if they had the ability to create livable habitats from Martian materials.

The many kilometers of natural underground tunnels would allow colonists to reclaim as much space as they would ever need by sealing tunnel segments by using an ingenious, newly developed type of self-adjusting airlocks and filling the sealed tunnel segments with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere capable of sustaining human life. With the artificial lighting and hydroponics technology, they carried, the colonists would be able to grow genetically engineered vegetables and legumes that would grow quickly with a minimum of water to provide a sufficient if limited vegetarian diet. In time, with a great deal of luck, perhaps sources of ground water could be tapped, should these exist, and limited mining operations could begin to extract the necessary resources with which to build a better world. In the short run, building self-sustaining habitats that would allow for survival one day at a time would have to suffice.

The limited human gene pool provided by a dozen colonists was of great concern and did not bode well for the long-term viability of this final branch of humanity’s family tree. Among the precious payload their spaceship carried were eggs and sperm from 3,000 carefully selected donors to extend the colonist’s genetic pool and help ensure humanity’s future. If Mars could provide sufficient resources for colonists to someday return to the Moon, or the Moon for her own colonists to travel to Mars, humanity’s genetic diversity would be further strengthened. Doubtful as either of these eventualities might be, humanity had many times in its past survived the darkest chapters in its long existence with hope and faith grounded on no more fertile ground than this. And, in any case, worrying about something that could not be changed was a fool’s errand, and there were no fools or congenital pessimists among the 12 people chosen to give humanity its best chance of survival on Mars.