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Re:Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared ban... by nkrisc on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @09:37AM (#19143753)
If you want to study Mars, actually being there opens up new avenues of study. If you're going to study Mars from Earth, it doesn't make sense to do it from the Nevada desert.
Re:Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared ban... by lisper on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @09:44AM (#19143817)
That's true. But if you want to colonize Mars then it makes a hell of a lot of sense to practice first in some place like the Nevada desert.
Re:Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared ban... by wyattpeak on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @06:17PM (#19148707)
What do you mean by this objection? There are several projects practicing surviving in isolated conditions for precisely that purpose.[1]

Simply surviving on Earth, however isolated, is hardly helpful though. You need to simulate things like the lack of an atmosphere to teach you anything useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_analog_habitat

Re:Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared ban... by lisper on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @01:54AM (#19150992)
> There are several projects practicing surviving in isolated conditions for precisely that purpose.

Yes, and not a single one of them has ever sustained a mission for more than a few months (AFAIK). If we're going to colonize Mars we need to be able to sustain these kinds of efforts for years.

We're trying to run a marathon before we've even learned how to crawl.