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This is a very good article. It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. Yes, a big rocket is necessary prereq

This is a very good article. It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. Yes, a big rocket is necessary prerequisite for Mars. No, it is not the only problem you need to solve. And also having worked with the reality of human spaceflight operations, we are just not ready yet to send a spacecraft into deep space for months on end. It's easy to throw out blithe statements that we "just need a big spaceship", or we'll use ion drives or some other such tech, but the reality is way more messy than that. We just aren't ready yet and we won't be for some time.

lapcat 2y ago
> It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. This is just the latest version of The Music Man and Marge vs. the Monorail. Musk is serious about getting rich but not about going to Mars. It's always been a ploy to trick naive tech nerds into sacrificing themselves for the goal of "saving the world". Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving". The market is obvious: well-off tech nerds who are made to feel good about themselves that their luxury purchase, with cool technology, is "saving the Earth". (A similar strategy is used by Apple, by the way. Apple convinces people that buying a new iPhone every year or few years is "carbon neutral" and that it's somehow ok to eschew device repairability, upgradability, user battery replacement, etc.) We're told that the plan was to sell cheaper Teslas "later". It's always later. Yet other auto manufacturers have produced cheaper electric vehicles without the self-driving crap, and still for Tesla it's "later". So Musk has $44 billion to spend on Twitter but not on taking lower margins on Tesla vehicles? We're told now, by Musk, that the biggest barrier to the Mars project is not, say, the gravity on Mars, or the radiation, but rather "the woke mind virus". Uh huh. Con man. I'm not denying Musk's accomplishments, any more than I'm denying that Trump managed to get himself elected POTUS twice. But they're both con men, and their real goals—power, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement—have never been the same as what they tell to their followers. They're surely among the best con men on the planet. It feels like all of the top con men are coming together now for the big heist, like Ocean's Eleven.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  For sure; as the article points out, a viable trip to Mars requires a ton of investments yet, but Musk is currently helping dismantle NASA and the ISS, probably with the intent of sending more high value contracts to SpaceX. Any stage in making a mars trip viable is a multi-billion dollar project. Actually arriving on or around mars has no value in itself other than the achievement and some science, but the runup will possibly make SpaceX the wealthiest company in the world. Or at least pull tens, hundreds of billions out of the US economy.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    What you're saying doesn't even make any logical sense. Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. From Musk's perspective, NASA is an unnecessary, inconvenient middleman. Eliminate the public middleman, and everything goes to private companies, in other words, to SpaceX. And it's not just about NASA; the current administration wants to privatize the entire government, including the US Postal Service, for example. > And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending. Musk/DOGE currently controls all federal spending.
    - throw0101a 2y ago
      > Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. Just because they're doing fine now, doesn't mean we want to give SpaceX a monopoly in the future. Reminder: SpaceX was not a thing a few years ago, and NASA throwing money at them could have been considered 'wasteful' when there was a solution that worked already. We are where we are now because the government spread the money around a bit: some of those 'bets' worked out, some did not.
innis226 2y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, Isn't he getting the ball rolling? Put aside his unrealistic timelines, at least he's trying to solve the rocketry part of the equation. I feel like this extreme hatred is unwarranted.
Robotbeat 2y ago
The large rocket adddresses basically all the problems. Time between resupply? Well, you can just take a bunch of resupply missions with you. Most stuff is packed ahead of time, except fresh veggies and fruits, but deep freezers can keep the nutritional value of those nearly as well as being fresh. Redundancy/reliability? Bring the spare pool with you instead of keeping it on the surface for resupply flights. Bring two different systems. Long duration life support? Enough mass allows you to avoid it all together if you like. This still has not sunk in to most of the fairly educated people who opine on this topic. Simple life support systems are VERY reliable, and the advantage of advanced life support systems is they reduce mass. If you don’t need the mass reduction, you don’t need the advanced life support. Far from medical care? Small crew sizes are a mass constraint. More mass means you can afford large crews with dedicated medical personnel. And the equipment to go allow with it. Also applies to radiation shielding (mass) and even partial gravity (centrifugal gravity is well known as a replacement but for some inexplicable reason is avoided… and yea, even short arm centrifuge is useful and could be used on the surface… the disorienting effects are actually manageable, and while in space, a tether can be used to enable long arm centrifugal gravity with little Coriolis effect). Transit times can also be reduced significantly with refueling. 80-120 day transits are feasible, not just the most efficient 150-210 day transits for long stay. The surface of Mars also has significant radiation shielding in spite of the thin atmosphere. The Mars rover Curiosity measures the same radiation equivalent on Mars’s surface as on ISS today. Mars rover Perseverance also demonstrated production of unlimited oxygen from the Martian CO2 atmosphere using electricity. Regolith could also be used to enhance radiation shielding. This is before discussing water mining (and even that can be done without touching regolith, just the air using the WAVAR technique… useful for crew consumption although this method doesn’t scale up to producing enough for propellant very well). There is no a single hazard or obstacle to a Mars mission that isn’t at least partially mitigated by having a lot more mass capability, ie a big and cheap reusable rocket (capable of landing on Mars and aerobraking).
- jefurii 2y ago
  You haven't read the article have you? So far it looks like your comments suggest the answer is just FAFO. That certainly will be interesting.
- 2y ago
Robotbeat 2y ago
We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech. We had only barely launched an astronaut on a suborbital flight at that time! And yet 7 years later…
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong. I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.
  - Robotbeat 2y ago
    “Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way. The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
    - Retric 2y ago
      > you can make new technology in one day. Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it. People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong. Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
A big rocket is probably the biggest obvious hurdle. What are other people doing to get us to mars that is better than musk's approach?
- electriclove 2y ago
  [flagged]
- notahacker 2y ago
  No, the big rocket is the easy bit which has been done many times before. Designing a mission involving 1000 days in space with no prospect of resupply is the hard bit. And it's the likes of ESA and NASA that have visibly been spending money on research and testing for that bit, not the very successful private launch vehicle supplier and LEO constellation operator.
  - avmich 2y ago
    It's easy if you use additional payload available with bigger rockets. Just like invention of the rocket engine enabled all kinds of rockets, the ability of having a lot of payload available for the mission enables all kinds of solutions for existing problems. Robotbeat is correct.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      You need to determine what those solutions are before you figure out whether additional payload space is even necessary. I mean, if you just want more payload than is possible with the current largest launch vehicle, you send more rockets (and get redundancy for the return journey as a bonus!). Of course, there are mission design complications with sending multiple rockets, but there are also mission design complications involved in astronauts spending three years away from earth or even LEO that don't get handwaved away with extra mass too...
- darkwizard42 2y ago
  No, the biggest hurdle is having astronauts survive the journey (health and successful landing/departure of Mars). It would be over 3 years in space to round trip to Mars with current tech. We haven't had an astronaut in space continuously over ~1 year...the body suffers tremendously in a low gravity environment and you would have to handle SO many side effects and redundancies in life support etc.
gosub100 2y ago
I'm sure this question has been addressed already, but why not try a 1-year moon base first? With a hot standby ready to either rescue them or drop a brand new habitat. Not to mention launching to Mars from the moon is easier (in some respects, not all).
- ckemere 2y ago
  This is exactly what NASA has had on its timeline since the Obama era ("Constellation"). Trump #1 didn't like the slow timeframe (get to the moon faster - "Artemis"). Current plan from Trump/Elon ("let's scrap the space station and the moon and go to Mars ASAP") sounds like an even more accelerated abandonment.
  - Robotbeat 2y ago
    On the contrary, Constellation is from the Bush era. Obama tried to cancel it (with good reason, to be fair!), and then Trump started an accelerated Artemis, which basically combined both the Obama program of record with Constellation.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    I think a moon colony would be awesome. We could watch them in near real time. Learn what it actually takes to maintain a habitat while still having a safety net. Yes I know NASA and others have been researching that since the 60s anyway, but it needs a dress rehearsal with modern technology. Go to moon, prove we can sustain N humans, process the waste, recycle the water, make O2, etc. Do it on the lunar surface, then go big. I do see Trumps side, that if they take decades to get anything done, maybe the project should be scrapped. But space-x has proven they can launch rockets reliably and cheaply, I believe we should use their innovation but to the moon before the red planet.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  There's nothing Mars analog at the Moon we can't or haven't already learned at the ISS.
  - 2y ago
asadotzler 2y ago
We've had a spacecraft in orbit around Earth for a quarter century with many astronauts having years of experience up there, including long duration stays of up to about a year. The idea that we can't do space with duration is silly.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  Right, and that station is in LEO and getting resupplied pretty frequently. We do not have any examples of space orne and isolated systems supporting human life for months, especially beyond the magnetosphere.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    The ISS's orbit is not particularly stable and it needs regular reboosts which leaves everything else scheduled with this in mind. Providing food and other necessary resources for a long stay would not be especially difficult, but there's no need for it, and that leaves more volume to store other stuff. The ISS, despite being a 'station', is very small with a pressurized volume of about 900m^3, about 100m^3 less than Starship. The linked capsule design also means the real usable volume is substantially less.
- numpad0 2y ago
  IMO. They know darn well that we're simply not ready to sail into deep space. Radiation shielding, orbital manufacturing, computer autonomy, peaceful nuclear use, etc. Lots of needed hypothetical technologies, or requisite trust and social stability that allows for the use of those technologies are missing. They couldn't even get to work on it in some of domains. We in the public all knew about that wall by the 1980s: the anime Mobile Suit Gundam(1979) literally begins with a space habitat declaring independence and creating a Bay of Sydney in Australia by gassing and throwing down a resisting habitat with a reverse swing-by at the back of the Moon. It's all overblown plot for a work of fiction, but also something everyone knows will happen eventually that no one has response strategies for. So as the immediate "path forward", NASA put up a boathouse next to a small lake near the ocean under the pretense that long-term researches of effects of lakewater on human body are to be conducted, using surplus Russian cargo ships. We know what happens if we did row into the ocean with the boats we have or can launch from Earth, we die from radiation. They're not conducting researches, they're just trying to keep the boat makers alive until we sort out the trust problem needed to work on the work to follow. Not a lot had changed on that front in the past few decades, other than that the aforementioned weak trust had started collapsing very recently. No way the world is going to trust the US with NERVAs and Lunar shipyards under the current circumstance.

lapcat 2y ago

> It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. This is just the latest version of The Music Man and Marge vs. the Monorail. Musk is serious about getting rich but not about going to Mars. It's always been a ploy to trick naive tech nerds into sacrificing themselves for the goal of "saving the world". Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving". The market is obvious: well-off tech nerds who are made to feel good about themselves that their luxury purchase, with cool technology, is "saving the Earth". (A similar strategy is used by Apple, by the way. Apple convinces people that buying a new iPhone every year or few years is "carbon neutral" and that it's somehow ok to eschew device repairability, upgradability, user battery replacement, etc.) We're told that the plan was to sell cheaper Teslas "later". It's always later. Yet other auto manufacturers have produced cheaper electric vehicles without the self-driving crap, and still for Tesla it's "later". So Musk has $44 billion to spend on Twitter but not on taking lower margins on Tesla vehicles? We're told now, by Musk, that the biggest barrier to the Mars project is not, say, the gravity on Mars, or the radiation, but rather "the woke mind virus". Uh huh. Con man. I'm not denying Musk's accomplishments, any more than I'm denying that Trump managed to get himself elected POTUS twice. But they're both con men, and their real goals—power, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement—have never been the same as what they tell to their followers. They're surely among the best con men on the planet. It feels like all of the top con men are coming together now for the big heist, like Ocean's Eleven.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
For sure; as the article points out, a viable trip to Mars requires a ton of investments yet, but Musk is currently helping dismantle NASA and the ISS, probably with the intent of sending more high value contracts to SpaceX. Any stage in making a mars trip viable is a multi-billion dollar project. Actually arriving on or around mars has no value in itself other than the achievement and some science, but the runup will possibly make SpaceX the wealthiest company in the world. Or at least pull tens, hundreds of billions out of the US economy.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  What you're saying doesn't even make any logical sense. Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. From Musk's perspective, NASA is an unnecessary, inconvenient middleman. Eliminate the public middleman, and everything goes to private companies, in other words, to SpaceX. And it's not just about NASA; the current administration wants to privatize the entire government, including the US Postal Service, for example. > And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending. Musk/DOGE currently controls all federal spending.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    > Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts. Just because they're doing fine now, doesn't mean we want to give SpaceX a monopoly in the future. Reminder: SpaceX was not a thing a few years ago, and NASA throwing money at them could have been considered 'wasteful' when there was a solution that worked already. We are where we are now because the government spread the money around a bit: some of those 'bets' worked out, some did not.

innis226 2y ago

Just to play devil's advocate, Isn't he getting the ball rolling? Put aside his unrealistic timelines, at least he's trying to solve the rocketry part of the equation. I feel like this extreme hatred is unwarranted.

Robotbeat 2y ago

The large rocket adddresses basically all the problems. Time between resupply? Well, you can just take a bunch of resupply missions with you. Most stuff is packed ahead of time, except fresh veggies and fruits, but deep freezers can keep the nutritional value of those nearly as well as being fresh. Redundancy/reliability? Bring the spare pool with you instead of keeping it on the surface for resupply flights. Bring two different systems. Long duration life support? Enough mass allows you to avoid it all together if you like. This still has not sunk in to most of the fairly educated people who opine on this topic. Simple life support systems are VERY reliable, and the advantage of advanced life support systems is they reduce mass. If you don’t need the mass reduction, you don’t need the advanced life support. Far from medical care? Small crew sizes are a mass constraint. More mass means you can afford large crews with dedicated medical personnel. And the equipment to go allow with it. Also applies to radiation shielding (mass) and even partial gravity (centrifugal gravity is well known as a replacement but for some inexplicable reason is avoided… and yea, even short arm centrifuge is useful and could be used on the surface… the disorienting effects are actually manageable, and while in space, a tether can be used to enable long arm centrifugal gravity with little Coriolis effect). Transit times can also be reduced significantly with refueling. 80-120 day transits are feasible, not just the most efficient 150-210 day transits for long stay. The surface of Mars also has significant radiation shielding in spite of the thin atmosphere. The Mars rover Curiosity measures the same radiation equivalent on Mars’s surface as on ISS today. Mars rover Perseverance also demonstrated production of unlimited oxygen from the Martian CO2 atmosphere using electricity. Regolith could also be used to enhance radiation shielding. This is before discussing water mining (and even that can be done without touching regolith, just the air using the WAVAR technique… useful for crew consumption although this method doesn’t scale up to producing enough for propellant very well). There is no a single hazard or obstacle to a Mars mission that isn’t at least partially mitigated by having a lot more mass capability, ie a big and cheap reusable rocket (capable of landing on Mars and aerobraking).

jefurii 2y ago
You haven't read the article have you? So far it looks like your comments suggest the answer is just FAFO. That certainly will be interesting.
2y ago

Robotbeat 2y ago

We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft… We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech. We had only barely launched an astronaut on a suborbital flight at that time! And yet 7 years later…

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong. I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.
- Robotbeat 2y ago
  “Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way. The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > you can make new technology in one day. Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it. People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong. Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

A big rocket is probably the biggest obvious hurdle. What are other people doing to get us to mars that is better than musk's approach?

electriclove 2y ago
[flagged]
notahacker 2y ago
No, the big rocket is the easy bit which has been done many times before. Designing a mission involving 1000 days in space with no prospect of resupply is the hard bit. And it's the likes of ESA and NASA that have visibly been spending money on research and testing for that bit, not the very successful private launch vehicle supplier and LEO constellation operator.
- avmich 2y ago
  It's easy if you use additional payload available with bigger rockets. Just like invention of the rocket engine enabled all kinds of rockets, the ability of having a lot of payload available for the mission enables all kinds of solutions for existing problems. Robotbeat is correct.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    You need to determine what those solutions are before you figure out whether additional payload space is even necessary. I mean, if you just want more payload than is possible with the current largest launch vehicle, you send more rockets (and get redundancy for the return journey as a bonus!). Of course, there are mission design complications with sending multiple rockets, but there are also mission design complications involved in astronauts spending three years away from earth or even LEO that don't get handwaved away with extra mass too...
darkwizard42 2y ago
No, the biggest hurdle is having astronauts survive the journey (health and successful landing/departure of Mars). It would be over 3 years in space to round trip to Mars with current tech. We haven't had an astronaut in space continuously over ~1 year...the body suffers tremendously in a low gravity environment and you would have to handle SO many side effects and redundancies in life support etc.

gosub100 2y ago

I'm sure this question has been addressed already, but why not try a 1-year moon base first? With a hot standby ready to either rescue them or drop a brand new habitat. Not to mention launching to Mars from the moon is easier (in some respects, not all).

ckemere 2y ago
This is exactly what NASA has had on its timeline since the Obama era ("Constellation"). Trump #1 didn't like the slow timeframe (get to the moon faster - "Artemis"). Current plan from Trump/Elon ("let's scrap the space station and the moon and go to Mars ASAP") sounds like an even more accelerated abandonment.
- Robotbeat 2y ago
  On the contrary, Constellation is from the Bush era. Obama tried to cancel it (with good reason, to be fair!), and then Trump started an accelerated Artemis, which basically combined both the Obama program of record with Constellation.
- gosub100 2y ago
  I think a moon colony would be awesome. We could watch them in near real time. Learn what it actually takes to maintain a habitat while still having a safety net. Yes I know NASA and others have been researching that since the 60s anyway, but it needs a dress rehearsal with modern technology. Go to moon, prove we can sustain N humans, process the waste, recycle the water, make O2, etc. Do it on the lunar surface, then go big. I do see Trumps side, that if they take decades to get anything done, maybe the project should be scrapped. But space-x has proven they can launch rockets reliably and cheaply, I believe we should use their innovation but to the moon before the red planet.
asadotzler 2y ago
There's nothing Mars analog at the Moon we can't or haven't already learned at the ISS.
- 2y ago

asadotzler 2y ago

We've had a spacecraft in orbit around Earth for a quarter century with many astronauts having years of experience up there, including long duration stays of up to about a year. The idea that we can't do space with duration is silly.

SR2Z 2y ago
Right, and that station is in LEO and getting resupplied pretty frequently. We do not have any examples of space orne and isolated systems supporting human life for months, especially beyond the magnetosphere.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  The ISS's orbit is not particularly stable and it needs regular reboosts which leaves everything else scheduled with this in mind. Providing food and other necessary resources for a long stay would not be especially difficult, but there's no need for it, and that leaves more volume to store other stuff. The ISS, despite being a 'station', is very small with a pressurized volume of about 900m^3, about 100m^3 less than Starship. The linked capsule design also means the real usable volume is substantially less.
numpad0 2y ago
IMO. They know darn well that we're simply not ready to sail into deep space. Radiation shielding, orbital manufacturing, computer autonomy, peaceful nuclear use, etc. Lots of needed hypothetical technologies, or requisite trust and social stability that allows for the use of those technologies are missing. They couldn't even get to work on it in some of domains. We in the public all knew about that wall by the 1980s: the anime Mobile Suit Gundam(1979) literally begins with a space habitat declaring independence and creating a Bay of Sydney in Australia by gassing and throwing down a resisting habitat with a reverse swing-by at the back of the Moon. It's all overblown plot for a work of fiction, but also something everyone knows will happen eventually that no one has response strategies for. So as the immediate "path forward", NASA put up a boathouse next to a small lake near the ocean under the pretense that long-term researches of effects of lakewater on human body are to be conducted, using surplus Russian cargo ships. We know what happens if we did row into the ocean with the boats we have or can launch from Earth, we die from radiation. They're not conducting researches, they're just trying to keep the boat makers alive until we sort out the trust problem needed to work on the work to follow. Not a lot had changed on that front in the past few decades, other than that the aforementioned weak trust had started collapsing very recently. No way the world is going to trust the US with NERVAs and Lunar shipyards under the current circumstance.