Build a ship, give her a name, and send her to Mars.
Everything she carries has to be carried, and carrying it costs more of everything else — so every choice below spends the same thing: mass. The numbers on this page are real ones. Nothing is rounded in your favor.
Choose your ship.
The purpose picks the hull. Each one is a different compromise between what it can carry, what it can land, and how much of itself is structure.
Give her a name.
Ships have always been named after people. It is the oldest habit in seafaring and it survived into spaceflight intact — Tibbets painted his mother’s name on a bomber, and every Apollo crew named their two craft before they flew them. Give her a name and she stops being a mass budget.
Someone you know. A person you miss, or love, or want remembered. It is the oldest tradition there is, and it is the one thing no list can offer you.
Nothing is fixed yet. Once you commit to her you have a week to change your mind, and after that it goes on the hull, in the log, and in the history book — which is permanent, whatever becomes of her.
People, or nobody?
This decides more than anything else on the page. A ship with nobody aboard needs no air, no water, no food and very little shielding — watch three sections of this plan disappear.
Choose what she carries.
Recyclers are heavy, and they earn their mass back only on a long trip with a full crew. Provisions are light per day and ruinous over eight months. The right answer is not the same for every mission — work it out.
| Item | Each | Qty | Mass |
|---|
Where she leaves from, and which day.
Where you leave from and when. Neither is cosmetic: a pad nearer the equator borrows more of Earth’s spin, and a later departure takes longer rather than costing more fuel — which a crew pays for in food and in radiation.
How much mass to hide behind.
Beyond Earth’s magnetic field the crew sit in a constant sleet of galactic cosmic rays. Mass helps. It helps less and less, and it never reaches zero — past about fifteen tonnes you are paying a great deal for very little. The real cure is not shielding. It is arriving sooner.
What she does if the Sun flares and nobody answers.
Shielding stops the slow drizzle of cosmic rays. It is a solar particle event that arrives all at once — and Earth sees those coming, while she cannot. Decide now what she does on her own, because she may be hours from an answer when one arrives.