Fake because they're probably just captured asteroids. Counts as a moon, but not quite as cool. And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spe

Fake because they're probably just captured asteroids. Counts as a moon, but not quite as cool. And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important. I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself. I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.