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First of all, going to Mars is hard. It makes going to the moon look easy. Most missions to Mars have failed - in fact, with fifty years of trying, the USSR and
by danielvf 10y ago
First of all, going to Mars is hard. It makes going to the moon look easy. Most missions to Mars have failed - in fact, with fifty years of trying, the USSR and Russia has never had a successful Mars mission. A round trip to the Moon is a week, a round trip to Mars is four years in space.
So if we could do humans on Mars, it would mean that we had learned far more than we used to know. It's like the difference between climbing a hill in your city, and climbing Mt Everest.
- sago 10y agoDoesn't that argue for doing the moon first? If you say "yeah we've not climbed any hills yet, but we're totally gonna try Everest" that might not show much common sense. And if the aim is to just try to do the hardest possible thing we can think of, why Mars and not, say Venus? I think difficulty is a red herring. The other suggested reasons (atmosphere, gravity, water) seem much better reasons.
- danielvf 10y agoWe've already been to the moon first though, several times. Mars is the next (huge) step forward in difficulty.
- sago 10y agoWe've visited for a few hours, this is about putting a colony on it. That's orders of magnitude more difficult. Why do something orders of magnitude more difficult on a planet orders of magnitude more difficult to reach? As I said, the other answers seemed to give credible suggestions.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]