Destination Comparison

The twelve

Twelve destinations compared on shared axes.

Each row is one destination at its canonical site - Shackleton for the Moon, Arcadia Planitia for Mars, the 50-55 km cloud layer for Venus, Callisto for the Jovian System, Titan for the Saturnian System, Triton for Neptune. Filter by presence, energy source, water status or confidence; click a numeric heading to sort.

Observed Building Projected Modeled Confidence scale

Reading across

What the columns show side by side.

Δv and distance disagree. Venus at 3.5 km/s from LEO is the cheapest planetary arrival on the map, and Mars at 4.9 undercuts the lunar surface at 5.9 because the Martian atmosphere pays for most of the braking. Mercury at 13.4 km/s costs more than Callisto at 11.8 - the Sun's well makes the closest planet the most expensive inner destination, which is why MESSENGER needed six flybys and BepiColombo needs nine before orbit insertion in November 2026.

Sunlight falls about 10,000-fold from Mercury's polar ridge at 6.7× Earth's to Pluto at 0.06%. Solar holds through the Belt for prospecting - NASA's Psyche flies solar-electric at 3 AU - and fission becomes the only industrial option from Ceres outward. The one exception on the drawing board is a beam from a Mercury collector array, with Callisto as its first customer.

Water is native at eight of the twelve sites. Earth orbit and cislunar space import it, from the ground today and from Shackleton's permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) later. Venus has no water to speak of - its only hydrogen is bound in the sulfuric acid clouds - and an interstellar sail carries nothing at all.

Light time crosses one second at cislunar space, one hour at Titan, and four hours at Triton and Pluto. Past the Moon every site decides for itself; past the Belt it does so for an hour or more before anyone on Earth can answer. Breakthrough Starshot's target, Alpha Centauri, sits 4.4 years away one way.

Chinese hardware is at or bound for six of the twelve. Tiangong has been continuously crewed since 2022; Queqiao-2 has relayed from lunar orbit since March 2024; Chang'e-7 targets the ridge near Shackleton and is part of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) basic model; Tianwen-1's Zhurong rover landed in Utopia Planitia in 2021 and Tianwen-3 is the Mars sample-return mission; Tianwen-2 reached the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa in 2026 and continues to main-belt comet 311P; Tianwen-4 is planned to orbit Callisto.

Basis

Units, sites and tags.

• Δv from LEO - km/s, as carried on each destination card. Interstellar has no meaningful Δv; a beam-driven sail carries no reaction mass.
• Light time - one way, across the range of geometry. Ceres runs 15-31 minutes from opposition to conjunction.
• Sunlight - relative to 1,361 W/m² at 1 AU, at the site's mean distance. Titan's is the figure at the top of the haze.
• Water - Native means extractable at the site; Imported means shipped in; None means absent at any useful grade.
• Tags - every value carries its own tag. A planned mission is Projected or Modeled even when the body's physical figures are Observed.

Record

Provenance.