Solar Expanse E4: Landing on Mercury (by Cheating the Safety Regs) & Unlocking Athena

As Mars hits its 1,000 population mark, my eyes are looking for places that might be able to feed materials into the new forges. Our asteroid bases are resource rich but a pain to get to. Mercury is considerably closer and just as rich...but someone at the ESA apparently has a checklist that says you can't land people there because it's "Utterly incompatible with human life" or something. Fortunately, that safety checklist has metrics...and metrics can be exploited. Patreon:   / perunau