Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to The Moon wins.

Re: The Moon wins.
Arthur Smith — (archived)

Obviously the Moon and Mars are very different from one another, just as both are very different from the Earth. But if we are ever to use off-planet physical resources, that requires a fundamental set of mining and initial processing steps that cannot be tested off a "planetary" (or at least asteroid) surface. With the proximity of the Moon, even if the specific materials and environment is somewhat different from that on Mars, trying to do it there first allows a wide variety of approaches to be tried with much lower risk. On Mars, we'll have to get it all pretty much right the first time, or our colonists are dead; with the Moon there's a lot more lee-way to resolve problems as we find them.

And that's also why returning to the Moon will be far less expensive than the first Mars trip...

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