Should our next crewed landings be on Mars or the Moon?

[Canopus]

@DNKKING i don‘t see how Mars is going to provide prosperity, you are certainly not going to transport anything created on Mars back to earth, Mars would be a money pit for decades before you‘d make any money from it and sadly, money is the biggest driving factor for our society. 

 

[DNKKING]

1 minute ago, Canopus said:

@DNKKING i don‘t see how Mars is going to provide prosperity, you are certainly not going to transport anything created on Mars back to earth, Mars would be a money pit for decades before you‘d make any money from it and sadly, money is the biggest driving factor for our society. 

 

Space X and NASA want what they send to Mars to stay there, have children there and die there.

And that the children have a children and stay there.

[Canopus]

4 minutes ago, DNKKING said:

Space X and NASA want what they send to Mars to stay there, have children there and die there.

Nasa has no colonization ambitions, And while SpaceX may say their end goal is to have a Mars base, they still need money to accomplish that. When SpaceX talks about Mars, it‘s for PR purposes, since the meme of a mars colony has a large distribution in culture.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Canopus

[tater]

The next crew landings _will_ be the Moon. There's simply no question of that.

NASA does not, and will not have the budget to do a Mars mission until there is some off the shelf solution that fits their budget. That would require a third party (say SpaceX) to develop this tech, and price it in such a way NASA can afford it. Even under that distant possibility, any such tech has the Moon as a very likely test mission (and/or other paying customers, or indeed NASA as a paying customer).

There's literally no possible future where the next human boots are on Mars, not the Moon.

[Bill Phil]

It seems like there are two separate discussions in this thread: exploration (flags and footprints, landings, potentially bases) and colonization (as in, settlement, industrialization, and so on).

In terms of exploration, I'd love it if we could do both. Heck, if we could throw in a HAVOC style mission to Venus at the same time I'd be all for it. Of course the best way to do this would be with an expandable architecture that takes advantage of previously developed and high TRL technologies. For example we could use an architecture based on electric propulsion that could deliver supplies and cargo to the exploration targets before the arrival of crew. The electric tugs could be capable of delivering payloads to the Moon, Venus, and Mars from LEO. Nuclear thermal crew vehicles could be used to deliver crew, but electric propulsion could as well depending on the mission design.

In terms of colonization... none of these are good targets. Not one. Not only that but we do not have the technology to colonize and we won't unless we develop the technology - which takes investment that people likely won't be willing to risk. Even if we do get the technology, the Moon and Mars are terrible targets. The best option so far seems to be completely artificial environments in the vain of the Stanford Torus. We don't have the tech for those either, but we could get it with much less investment as they'd be much closer to Earth and so the life support wouldn't need to be fully closed as a system. The first settlements could be built in equatorial LEO witch happens to have very low radiation for a location in space, and so much less shielding would be needed for orbital settlements. It also turns out that we could potentially build smaller faster rotating structures (4 rpm may be completely healthy, we don't know). If so the first settlements could be just thousands of tonnes. A similar mass would likely be needed for any settlement (plus radiation shielding) in any location as structural mass is actually a pretty small portion of the total mass. And if one compares the largest mass manmade objects in LEO vs. on Mars or the Moon, well LEO wins out. The ISS is 400+ tonnes, whereas the largest manmade object on the Moon was the 15 or so tonne LM and the largest on Mars is the Curiosity rover at about one tonne. In terms of ability we're closer to building large structures in LEO than on the Moon or Mars. Eventually, if the Moon or asteroids were to be mined (no actual extraction of metals is needed, just processing to standardize the density) then the settlements could move out of LEO with radiation shielding.

That said I'm all for exploration of the solar system, especially manned exploration. But colonies aren't practical, and the only ones that could be practical don't seem likely to be on any celestial bodies.

[DNKKING]

First the Moon and then Mars.

Edited May 3, 2019 by DNKKING