The moon? Been there, done that. Mars? Is that the best you can do? What spaceflight really needs is a one-way manned mission to explore Jupiter’s icy and mysterious moon Europa.

At least that’s the idea behind a project launched this week called Objective Europa, which aims to create a detailed plan for how to put human footprints on the snowy surface of this outer body. Moreover, they want to hear from you. Objective Europa is hoping to crowdsource the endeavor, gathering all the best minds and concepts on the internet to address this topic.

It probably sounds like a big step to start preparing for a manned Europa mission. We’re barely getting our astronauts outside Earth’s atmosphere, let alone to more distant locations. Europa orbits Jupiter, a planet that’s nearly 630 million kilometers from here. The environment there is one of the most extreme in the solar system, with dim sunlight, deadly radiation, and a whole mess of potentially dangerous unknowns.

Yet Europa has long been on the list of places we want to explore with robots. It is particularly interesting to astrobiologists for what may be lurking beneath its icy crust: a vast ocean containing more water than Earth and, perhaps, some crazy alien creatures. Maybe it’s never too early to start thinking about putting humans there.

The man behind Objective Europa is Kristian von Bengtson, a designer and architect with aspirations of building his own rocket and launching himself into space (he chronicles this effort on his Rocket Shop blog on WIRED). He is a man fascinated by big challenges, and the fact that a manned Europa mission is hard – borderline impossible at this stage – is exactly what attracts him.

“If you’re thinking about doing something that’s been done before, it’s not very fun, it’s not rewarding,” von Bengtson said. “But the big challenge – you can’t let it go.”

A concept sketch for a Europa lander from the Objective Europa team. Evan Twyford

The goal of Objective Europa at this point is fundamental research, using the internet to gauge interest, get people on board for discussions, and see what’s feasible. They are not looking for funding for their plan, which is decades if not centuries from happening and would cost hand-wavy billions of dollars. Simply by putting the idea out there, von Bengtson hopes to drum up interest and make it happen a little sooner.

“I kind of have this naïve idea that if humanity wants to do something badly enough and there’s enough people backing it, then eventually we can pull it off,” he said.

Europa is much more reachable than another star system many light-years away, he added. It’s likely that with enough time and money, a crew could reach the icy moon using mostly existing technology. And von Bengtson is also fairly realistic about what is and isn’t possible here. They're not looking to launch rockets anytime soon. At this point, Objective Europa’s website is merely a platform to put the idea out there and get others on board to do as much work as they want to.

“We have this amazing ability to get all the brainpower connected on the internet, and we have enough data to start looking into this,” he said. “So why the heck hasn’t anybody else tried to look into this?”

Part of the reason may be that there are so many challenges facing a human mission to Europa.

“Europa is probably one of the hardest places to go visit in the solar system,” said engineer Brian Cooke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has worked on robotic Europa concept missions. “It’s almost like the perfect storm of all the challenges of spaceflight in one place.”

Designing machines for a Europa mission means all the usual spaceflight tasks: making sure they can survive in a vacuum, can handle extreme temperature modulations, and have sufficient power to explore and beam back findings to Earth. Because Jupiter is five times farther from the sun than Earth, it receives less than 1/25th the sunlight that we get, and that means solar power is mostly out of the question, making nuclear batteries the most likely candidate for energy.

But the biggest challenge at Europa is the tremendous levels of radiation. Jupiter’s magnetic field traps charged particles streaming from the sun in a donut-shaped ring whose outer edge coincides with the orbit of Europa. The gas giant also produces its own radiation, meaning that robots and humans need shelter. That’s why NASA’s plans for any Europa probe call for placing as much mass around the spacecraft’s instruments as possible. Recent models suggest some areas on Europa may receive less radiation (.pdf), so perhaps these are the right places to look for landing spots.

A concept for a manned submersible for diving beneath Europa's ice. Evan Twyford

Landing on Europa’s surface wouldn’t be terribly different than landing on the moon, says Cooke. The problem is figuring out where. Europa’s surface is thought to be similar to places on Earth where icy glaciers calve into the ocean, a choppy and treacherous terrain. How dangerous? No one knows because very little of the surface has been mapped with the detail required to find a place for a spacecraft to land.

Plans on Objective Europa's website outline the goal of drilling through the moon’s frozen crust and perhaps sending a submersible to the ocean below. Both the operation of drilling through super-hard ice on a world where it's never before been done and carrying a submarine capable of exploring an unknown ocean are extreme engineering challenges. And these are just the mechanical difficulties facing any mission to Europa.

“Anytime you introduce humans, it’s an order of magnitude or two more challenging,” said engineer Bobby Braun, NASA's former chief technologist who now teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

People require food, water, air, protection, and plenty more to survive. A trip to Europa, even a one-way trip, would vastly exceed anything that even a Mars crew would face. The two or more year journey would take an incredible toll on astronauts' bodies and perhaps their minds.

Despite the many challenges, neither Cooke nor Braun could think of any showstoppers for a human Europa mission. Each applauded the Objective Europa project for starting to tackle the difficulties.

“My personal opinion is that it’s never too soon to think about a hard problem,” said Cooke.

When I asked if they might participate in the open forums on the project’s website, both said they were considering it. Braun thought it might make a nice project for his senior or graduate students to participate in. The website’s forums are fairly empty at this point. Only one topic, whether or not to plan for a one-way mission, has much active discussion. And already, opinions are divided.

“I'd rather have a robotics mission than a one way mission to Europa,” writes Findeton, a participant on the Objective Europa site. “It's one thing to have a one way mission to Mars, because you could theoretically live there indefinitely. But a one way mission to Europa implies certain death.”

Von Bengtson finds this subject one of the most interesting topics of the whole operation. It’s his opinion that people in the past were more willing to sacrifice lives for exploration; an undertaking he feels is fundamental to the human condition.

“People have done amazingly crazy things that have given us the technology we have today,” he said. “So why do we make such a big fuss about sending people to war, but we won’t sacrifice in the name of basic science or just being human?”

There has always been a component of space exploration that appeals to such romantic ideals. The Apollo program that landed men on the moon may have been about satisfying geopolitical goals but it was couched in idealistic terms. (Kennedy implored us to go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.) Objective Europa’s plan follows in this tradition.

Ultimately you can’t get boots on the ground with pretty speeches or cool ideas. You need cold, rational analysis. In this regard, Objective Europa is on the right path. Perhaps some great minds will be able to come up with great solutions to these hard challenges. Future generations may thank us.