FemMecha
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- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 14,067
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There is a lot of press being given to Musk’s goal to colonize Mars. I can appreciate that goal and dreamed if it as a child, but doesn’t it make sense to establish a stable colony on the moon first?
I had understood the Mars goal to be primarily a science station that would have a longer term goal to terraform the planet and expand towards building a city scale colony.
I don’t see how this could be done without first establishing a large-scale human presence on the moon. The close proximity of the moon makes it orders of magnitude more practical and it has fewer planetary complexities like epic sand storms. Once the moon has cities with mining, machine building, then components needed to create a mars civilization could be built on the moon first and then the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere would make space launches to Mars epically more convenient.
We could work out the bugs in the colonizing process on the moon where the travel commitment is so much less and rescue missions, and re-supply missions far more feasible.
There is a romance to colonizing Mars but the moon is the realistic pragmatic first step. Why not more discussion about this?
I had understood the Mars goal to be primarily a science station that would have a longer term goal to terraform the planet and expand towards building a city scale colony.
I don’t see how this could be done without first establishing a large-scale human presence on the moon. The close proximity of the moon makes it orders of magnitude more practical and it has fewer planetary complexities like epic sand storms. Once the moon has cities with mining, machine building, then components needed to create a mars civilization could be built on the moon first and then the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere would make space launches to Mars epically more convenient.
We could work out the bugs in the colonizing process on the moon where the travel commitment is so much less and rescue missions, and re-supply missions far more feasible.
There is a romance to colonizing Mars but the moon is the realistic pragmatic first step. Why not more discussion about this?