-- David Bowman, 2010: Odyssey Two

Forewarned is forearmed in science fact and science fiction when it comes to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Frigid and ice-covered, Europa is believed to harbor a giant liquid ocean beneath its crusty arctic surface, a primordial sea whose tidal motions are driven by Jovian gravity and warmed by intense radiation given off by the giant planet.

Yet despite the planet's fearsome environment, members of the Artemis Society, a private venture dedicated establishing a permanent, self-supporting community on the Moon, also have set their sites on the creation of a human colony at Europa.

The group has planned almost everything from how to build communities in subsurface air pockets, to how to program the colonists digital watches. Some folks at NASA are skeptical.

Blocks in the Europan crust provide more evidence of subterranian ocean. Credit: JPL

"Europa is right in the middle of an incredibly deadly radiation belt around Jupiter," said Jet Propulsion Laboratorys Rich Terrile, deputy project scientist for the Europa Orbiter. "A fairly well shielded human being on the surface of Europa, and even in the vicinity of Europa, would die in about 10 minutes. It would be like standing 30 feet (9 meters) away from the unshielded core of a 10-gigawatt nuclear reactor. Its just where you really dont want to be."

Dont think that the radiation-absorbing ice will protect any intrepid explorers either. According to Terrile, "if you get beneath maybe 6 feet (2 meters) of ice youll be okay. But youve got to get to the surface and every 10 minutes is a lethal dose so you dont have very much time."

The Artemis plan looks straight at the radiation problem and blinks. "For the purposes of our mission, we assume that it takes place in an era in which the engineering challenges of providing electromagnetic shielding have been mastered," says Peter Kokh, the primary author of the Europa plan.

Any chance deflector shields could protect the explorers? According to JPL's Terrile, "building these shielded ships is like being inside a VanDeGraph accelerator but these things don't work. You have to build these very, very high-charge gradients around you in order to deflect particles and there's no practical way to do that."

But recently Kokh has dreamed up an inspiringly simple solution for the radiation problem. "Callisto is outside the radiation zone," he says. "If you could start with a staging base where you jacket the ship with ice from Callisto, you could have either humans or robots mine the ice. That way you wouldn't have to spend all that fuel to get that shielding from the Earth."

As for how to survive on Europa's surface, "you just have to get under the ice fairly quickly," he says. "That's just an engineering detail."

Gravity and magnetic data collected by the NASA Galileo orbiter over the past five years have provided increasing evidence that an ocean exists underneath Europa's uniform 5- to 62-mile (10- to 100-kilometer) thick coat of ice. The possible ocean on Europa may contain more liquid water than all the oceans on Earth combined.

Magnetic studies have indicated that there must be a conducting layer in Europa. A salty ocean would fit the bill. Researchers hope to discover whether Europa is made up entirely of mushy ice or if it contains an ocean. Where there is water, there may be life.

The Artemis Society's main business is making manned exploration a business with models for a profit private Moon mining operation. But a manned Europa mission presents a sky-high obstacle for the even the most wild eyed financier.

"We can't present a business plan. Economic reasons to justify exploration of the outer solar system may emerge but we just can't see it now," says Peter Kokh, the primary author of the Europa plan.

Some ideas Kokh and the Artemis Society have created, like the International Space Station's Transhab module and an underslung lunar lander, have shown up years later in NASA plans.

"That's fine, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," says Kokh. "I don't care if anything gets attributed to me or not. I'm 63. I probably won't be seeing much of this happen. All I care about is getting my ideas in people's heads."

But if an expedition were launched tomorrow? "I'd give my left arm to go," he says. "The only requirement is that I could bring one of my dogs along."