Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
Why are they going straight to Mars without first testing all their equipment and procedures by creating a lunar colony? That seems like it would be much easier to achieve (in a very relative sense). Not to mention it would be much faster to re-supply a moon base with transit time taking 3-4 days rather than ~2 years.
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That kind of depends on the definition of "easy". From a pure fuel (or delta-V) perspective, Mars is easier than the moon, because you can use a
transfer orbit.
The downside of that is as you say the transit time. For a few day trip for humans you don't need to worry much about radiation, muscle and bone loss, etc, where for a trip to Mars you would.
But if we're talking colony, mass is going to be huge so Mars might actually make more sense from a pure "how much fuel will we need to move all that stuff" point of view.
Sending humans at all is the silly part IMO, send robots to build/maintain everything, or if you can't, send other robots to learn how to build robots to build everything.