MESSENGER probe reveals Mercurian vulcanism
From Saswato R. Das, Scientific American, August 4th 2010, "Mercury Rising" (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mercury-messenger-flyby) comes the report that the MESSENGER probe has discovered evidence of extensive vulcanism on
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Right now there's not that much interest in a manned mission to Mercury, in part because Mars is engaging our (the human race's) manned interplanetary intentions as the next target after planting a Lunar base. Another reason is that the technical difficulties of radiation shielding for the ship and crew are much greater if you're going in close to the Sun; 0.387 AU and thus more than 5 times as much insolation.
At present the likely (human) timescale is
2010's - Development and deployment of new generation of crewed vehicles for Earth-orbital operations. This includes possible new Russian, Chinese and private craft: after we have a President again in 2013 we might resume Constellation or build something better.
2020's - Manned Lunar exploration resumes, with the Americans, Chinese, and private firms conducting landings and building bases (Virgin projects a commercial Moonbase by 2030).
2030's - First manned missions to Mars. American and Russian operations probable; possibly also private (Space X is planning on developing a commercial nuclear booster in cooperation with the US government, and wants to build a Mars base around this time).
Now, note that manned missions to Mars require the development of interplanetary-capable man-rated spacecraft; what I'd term "space cruisers." The interesting thing about this is that the technology is applicable to more than one destination: while you'd want somewhat different choices between engines, fuel, supplies, and shielding for missions to Mars, the Belt, Venus or Mercury, the same general sort of ship could perform all those missions; indeed, the same specific ship could voyage to more than one destination, with appropriate refitting. You might even be able to "stretch" a Mars cruiser (with extra fuel and supplies) to reach the Jovian and Saturnian systems.
So I'm guessing that the 2040's to 2050's will see a vast expansion of manned activity throughout the Inner System at least, with perhaps some tentative steps being taken into the Outer System. The hardest part is getting into orbit, but by this time there will almost certainly be a dozen to several dozen nations and corporations with orbital launch capability, with maybe 25% of them being able to perform Lunar and 10% interplanetary operations.
At some point in this process, Mercury is an obvious target for exploration and prospecting. My guess is that the surface of Mercury will be reached after the surface of Mars, but before the surface of Venus (which presents special problems for manned exploration).
As for an exploratory base, I recall that there's a crater on the north pole which would be quite suitable, since the inside is always in the shade and a heat exchanger could be raised above the crater to capture solar energy as needed, so the base wouldn't be subject to drastic swings in temperature.
I have. The key real estate on Mercury lies at the poles; elsewhere you either have to deal with wild temperature swings (and remember that the day-night cycle is not straightforward on Mercury owing to its very long day and very short year) or keep moving (a base mounted on wheels or treads could oupace Mercury's rotation). Thus, early colonization will almost certainly be at the poles, even more so than is the case for Luna.
IMO by 2076-2100 or so there will be operational Mercurian mines, of some importance to the econmics of space colonization.
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