If we want to put people on Mars, we must prove we can put people on Moon, again.
It’s like saying visiting the marianas trench and Everest are the same because they’re both on earth
Mars would need water, air, energy, raw materials, fuel and everything else for (basically) ever.
There is zero to be gained (here) from a Mars colony. Mars lacks a magnetic field, air to breath, water to drink or cultivate crops, a temperature suitable for plant or animal life, fuel sources to build industry, supply chains for the construction or maintainence of the simplest electrical systems.
Talk of Mars is purely a PR play. Someone will be first. Yay. But Mars will play no part in Earth's future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Ceres
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_asteroid_b...
For spaxe infrastructure however - sure, stuff mined and manufactured on the Moon can definitely help any planetary missions.
but we have satellites for that
High resolution photographs of the entire earth (as opposed to tiny pieces of it) would have a massive positive emotional effect on people. The Earthrise photo's enduring popularity is proof of this. There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS. We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand and jaded 'it's just a rock, who cares' nay-sayers on the other.
Well, when US is not running out of money.
We already have this, it doesn't require being on the moon.
> There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS.
The scale of going to the ISS versus the moon is massively different. Most of the research we'd be doing on the moon that isn't just for robots to do like digging in the dirt could still be done on an orbiting space station (like, how to mitigate effects of microgravity on the human body, how to cultivate plants in low gravity, studying microorganisms and chemistry in space, etc.)
> We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
This doesn't require a human presence on the moon. We've had nearly uninterrupted robots on Mars for decades and haven't had a human on it.
> Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand
You had moon landing denialists even right after we landed. Us continuing to be on the moon isn't going to get rid of these naysayers. People are arguing the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change can't be possible, that the earth is 40,000 years old, and vaccines are mind control agents.
I get it would be cool and there probably is some science that could only be done with humans on the moon that I don't know about (I don't know everything, for sure). I think it would do a lot to push our engineering forward to have this kind of constant investment towards operating in space. But outside of being a means to funnel public funds to engineering firms to essentially find cooler ways to burn money I'm not sure it's all worth it.
Not saying we shouldn't have a space program! There's still lots we don't know about the universe and lots of cool science to learn. But do we need actual humans on the moon to achieve these goals?