We should do both! A human being can do more science in a handful of days than all of our robots we’ve ever sent to Mars have done in the years they have been there.
Yeah, but the distance to the moon is a lot shorter, better to practice colonization in an easier to get to location… Somewhere we can learn from our mistakes, rather than jump over that opportunity to a place it takes six months to get to… Where there can be no emergency parts shipped up when something starts breaking down.
Nah, much better to learn the most common problems near by, then take that knowledge and extra durability with us to mars.
Also that way we can develop generations of habitats, figure out the best requirements, and know what we’ll need, and develop light weight robust versions of things.
Trying to “Occupy Mars” without having a single building on the moon? That’s just some conman billionaires gimmick.
It’s not just about distance. It’s also about the ability to sustain. The Moon might end up being like Antarctica – with resources always flown in. So the Moon might always be a bunch of research stations supported by the Earth.
Mars is too far to pull this trick off, and telerobotics is much harder there due to the latency. So Mars makes more sense to work on establishing self-sufficiency than the Moon does. It also, conveniently, has a better set of resources to support the same.
But I do agree that we ought to use the Moon to test some things first :)
We shouldnhave sent like 20 scientists in a mad rush to science as hard as they can then send the robot to collect and transmit all the results from wherever they end up
We should do both! A human being can do more science in a handful of days than all of our robots we’ve ever sent to Mars have done in the years they have been there.
Yeah, but the distance to the moon is a lot shorter, better to practice colonization in an easier to get to location… Somewhere we can learn from our mistakes, rather than jump over that opportunity to a place it takes six months to get to… Where there can be no emergency parts shipped up when something starts breaking down.
Nah, much better to learn the most common problems near by, then take that knowledge and extra durability with us to mars.
Also that way we can develop generations of habitats, figure out the best requirements, and know what we’ll need, and develop light weight robust versions of things.
Trying to “Occupy Mars” without having a single building on the moon? That’s just some conman billionaires gimmick.
It’s not just about distance. It’s also about the ability to sustain. The Moon might end up being like Antarctica – with resources always flown in. So the Moon might always be a bunch of research stations supported by the Earth.
Mars is too far to pull this trick off, and telerobotics is much harder there due to the latency. So Mars makes more sense to work on establishing self-sufficiency than the Moon does. It also, conveniently, has a better set of resources to support the same.
But I do agree that we ought to use the Moon to test some things first :)
We shouldnhave sent like 20 scientists in a mad rush to science as hard as they can then send the robot to collect and transmit all the results from wherever they end up