I think it was more "who has a bigger rocket who can hit a precise target with a nuclear weapon" war. Going to the moon just proved the capability without nuki

I think it was more "who has a bigger rocket who can hit a precise target with a nuclear weapon" war. Going to the moon just proved the capability without nuking someone. I don't think people really understand the tyranny of the rocket equation and the propellant mass fraction. For the space shuttle, about 80% of the mass was fuel. Propellant mass fractions are typically around 0.8 to 0.9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellant_mass_fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellant_mass_fraction Going to Mars with people implies we're going to bring those people back. We've never launched something off of Mars before, and getting up to escape velocity on another planet (more than 2x the gravity of the Moon) isn't an easy task. The slower you go on the return trip also means you need more consumables (air, food, water) for the travelers. Not only do you have the mass to go up, but you have to land with that mass in order to launch again from the surface. I think the future is automated settlements. A group of robots 3d printing and producing things automatically (things like methane fuel, simple parts, what if we could build a rover on Mars) would be a huge boon and start bootstrapping Mars for human settlement. We would need to take a huge amount of stuff to start doing anything interesting on Mars. Something that would take lots of trips, before we could support just a few people. People are generally quite fragile and more of a liability: limited life span, unable to easily repair, get sick or ill, bored or depressed easily...