Mining the Moons of Mars

In previous posts I have talked about the resource potential of mining the Earth's moon for resources that would be incredibly useful for larger scale exploration of our solar system.  While the lunar surface has a ready abundance of oxygen in its regolith the availability of elements like hydrogen is far less impressive generally less than .1% of lunar regolith containing water.  While a range of project proposals have been put forth as to how we might still produce water on the moon, including simply shipping hydrogen from the Earth,  few publicly available papers discuss utilizing a multi-celestial body resource exchange.  The papers that do generally concern themselves with mining resources on the Martian surface.  If the intent of your program is to send a return mission from the Martian surface, by all means establishing some kind of Martian fuel refinery makes sense.  

        

If you simply want components for rocket fuel there is no need to land on the surface.  The moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, have tremendous potential for resource mining.  Two key properties make them extremely attractive for export oriented mining operations soil and gravity.  The soil composition of both moons include Carbonaceous chondrites (a category of minerals that can be rich in compounds like water and amino-acids).  The availability of carbonaceous chondrites alone would not make the Martian moons more appealing than their parent world as Mars has a range of potential compounds that could serve just as well as rocket fuel source materials, this is where the pull of gravity becomes a major factor.  Escaping the bonds of the Earth requires a space craft achieve a speed of 11.2 km/s (about 45X faster than a passenger jet plane's cruising speed) on Mars a spacecraft would need to achieve a speed of 5km/s.  For an explorer on the surface of Deimos launching into orbit would simply require that they be able to run at speeds over 20km/h (roughly 13 mph) on Phobos only Olympic athletes would be able to achieve escape velocity on foot (40km/h), so long as the spacesuit didn't interfere too much with their running technique (I'm ignoring any clever use of taking advantage of rotation).  

A mining operation working on the Martian moons would be able to launch materials into orbit with a standard baseball pitching machine (so long as they were only sending up small volumes).  Moving the material from orbits of the moons to locations that would be useful for spacecraft, refining facilities, construction platforms, etc...would still require a certain degree of fuel and that fact should not be ignored.  

If the resources found on Phobos and Deimos a viable quantity of high water content minerals, there would be relatively little need for a complex inter planet exchange of resources, water could "simply" be extracted from the rock and used as needed, spacecraft refueling upon arrival in Martian orbit.  That being said it would not be unreasonable to form a trade network between the Earth, its moon, and the moons of Mars, to provide a range of resources.  The Earth providing complex components, the moon generally providing oxygen, and Phobos and Deimos supplying organic compounds.  At this time there is no guarantee that we possess the necessary technologies to make this idea financially viable, but as more firms enter the fray to make a profit in our final frontier it is important to enter a point of paradigm blindness, where only free floating asteroids or the Lunar surface are considered for establishing humanities foothold among the stars.

Update July 8 2013, so it turns out that this idea was proposed at least as early as 1985 with the title 

"Phobos and Deimos (PhD): Concept for an Early Human Mission for Resources and Science" on the upside it turns out this idea warranted a PhD, so that's cool.