Ideas!

Tonight after supper, 10-year-old Sarah and I designed an exploration mission to Jupiter that would involve hundreds or thousands of tiny weather balloons fitted out with cameras and instruments to report data back to a few orbiting satellites, which would send the data back to Earth.

Then we fleshed out a story idea involving Girl Scouts on Mars - third-generation Martian girls whose grandparents had been among the first settlers of Mars later this century. The story might involve a trip to Earth, like current-day American scout trips to Europe.

I love being a Daddy :-)

Eremitical astronauts

There's some talk about setting up a one-way mission to Mars - a lone astronaut heads there to stay. That simplifies the whole man-to-Mars problem, and it also complicates it: no ordinary person is sane enough to withstand the spiritual and psychological rigors of solitary life on another planet.

That's a job for a person whose life is designed to be lived in isolation and in union with God - Camaldolese or Benedictine hermits, for example. Heck, you could probably get a largish crew of educated and trained Benedictine monks (or Carthusian or Camaldolese, etc.) to do the job and establish the first monastery on another planet. It would at least make a cool premise for a sci-fi novel.