Commercial Space Station

[Eshanas]

Back in the 1950s it was still assumed that Mars and Venus would be habitable for human beings and so worth colonising much as Africa had been in the 19th Century.
We learnt pretty quickly in the 1960s that this was not true and that nowhere in our Solar System offered the possibilities of life like that on Earth.
Realism set in after the moon.landings with unmanned missions to the rest of the Solar System and orbital missions for research in Earth orbit.
It is no accident that China has attempted to re-start moon mannec missions for polirical show similar to the 1960s Space Race.
The US with much greater technical experience has decided to put them in their place with Artemis.
But this is nothing more than a live replay of that wonderful 60s movie "Those Maginficent Men in the their Flying Machines".
True space exploration will continue to be by unmanned systems like the James Webb telescope and new and more efficient Mars Rovers.
Should mining on the Moon ever become necessary we have unmanned technology to do it. Possibly a few hardy astronauts too.
I grew up with Fireball XL5 and then Star Trek. My future seemed in those shows but in reality they were the last gasp of H G Wells and Jules Verne projecting Euopean Empires into Space. It is time to grow up and focus on what we have achieved with real science. Try looking at a few Hubble photos to see what I mean.

This sci-fi thinking is very much with us. Otherwise, no one would be seriously considering manned space missions. Unmanned missions have been vastly more productive and vastly less expensive, even for nearby destinations like the moon. Add the distances and time required to go further afield, with all the consequent debilitating effects of low-G and radiation, and manned space exploration becomes a non-starter--unless space exploration is not your real motive.

In Musk's case, it is not. Like a lot of contemporary billionaires, he subscribes to a weird "long-termist" philosophy that excuses him from worrying about clear and present dangers as long as he cares about the fate of the species in the far future.--in Musk's case, he thinks that AI killer robots will be coming for us all in the near future. So he argues that the species needs to get off the planet and start spreading. AI fears and long-termist expansionism are convenient, of course, because they distract him from having to do anything about the near-term problems that decide whether there will even be a long term.

I can only point out that we already have a much roomier space capsule with a high-capacity life-support system, food-making capability, and border collies, called Earth. We'd do better to learn to not screw up its systems before we go trying to live in metal boxes out in the vacuum.

In Cultish, the author once flabbergasted a TechBro who was like, 'elon musk, spaceships, living offworld', with... "I don't want to live in a spaceship." Even at worst, like earth is due to be hit by a asteroid or so, we can dig entire cities, nations, under the dirt and in the rock, saddam hussein level spring-mounted mountain buildings. That'll always be cheaper, faster, and easier than any offworld colony worth a self-sufficient damn. We can do aeroponics and hydroponics and tunneling machines here, live under mountains and expand.

At best, we can get space travel so cheap, hook up nuclear reactors to VASIMIR or bimodal NTRs to have the barest spin arrangements to make Mars trips with a month, we're stuck with Mars and the Moon to spread to, or turn the Moon and nearby asteroids into spaceship factories and hop around. A HOPE like mission is as far as we can conceivably send a person in any good grace, and that'll be hell on anyone who goes just from the time spent in a tin can alone.

Humanity is not as capable as it wishes it was, and is in a hostile system on a crippled biosphere of its own making. Maybe the Alcubierre drive might work, maybe advanced fusion will come by to power a myriad of systems needed to keep people alive, but that's just it - maybe. For now, and honestly forever unless some weird near omnipotent communist AI happens like in Orion's Arm with GAIA or the Fall and TITANs in Eclipse Phase, most of humanity will always live and die on Earth. Space will always be second for a long, long while. Even in Star Trek, (admittedly beta/secondary stuff like star trek star charts) hell, Earth has 4 billion people on it. Starfleet with its myriad tens of thousands of ships - of many races - was a fraction of that.

 

[publiusr]

There might be a hardy microbe on Mars that could have a cure for cancer or something. I think going to Mars makes more sense than climbing Everest. Set up some dishes there and link with Earth for ultra-long baseline projects?

 

[Kat Tsun]

If you're just looking for microbes then Percy or Curiosity already do that, but Mars doesn't have any life on it. Likely it never did.

Historically it seems to have been a shallow, briny ocean for a few hundred million years that dried out due to atmospheric stripping. There was neither enough time for life to develop nor the particularly unique conditions necessary for it. If anything existed it would have been incredibly simplistic single celled organisms, like life before the Proterozoic Era. Conditions were similar (water world, no continents, all ocean, etc.) except Mars was smaller, less topologically diverse, and likely lacking large quantities of oxygen.

It's apparently not big enough (or too far from the Sun i.e. too cold) to sustain an internal dynamo for a magnetic field. Sort of the opposite of Venus, which is too close to the Sun to form tectonic plates (the Venusian lithosphere is partially plastic, and periodically inverts when mantle pressure builds up, which is why it's so polluted) or maintain liquid water as the latter is stripped due to lack of magnetic field (not a problem in human timescales, but matters in geologic time). Of course, Venus can be solved relatively more simply by a solar shade, re-adding liquid water, and speeding up its spin if you wanted to terraform a planet. This can be solved by a two-stage method of a massive comet or ice moon impact imparting the necessary spin and water and a solar shade afterwards cooling the planet to form a proper tectonic cracking. Maybe.

Humans going to Mars is more a practical demonstration of scientific-technical prowess first, an ability to put in place relatively large scale experiments like mammalian reproduction in low gravity (mice or something) or GMO plant-based methods of clearing toxins (chlorine) from Martian soils (as opposed to simulation soil) in the real world second, and the sheer vanity of flag planting on a truly alien world third.

There's no actual reasons of scientific understanding that will matter for life on Earth to go to Mars. It's very much a blue skies, perhaps we should call it black skies, research endeavour. It's mostly a way to understand the history of the solar system, study the geological aspects of an alien world, and the physiological aspects of long-duration radiation and microgravity on large mammals in space primarily. It would be a tremendous detriment for health of the astronauts, obviously, like going to the South/North Pole or climbing Everest was for their explorers both failed and successful.

None of that is particularly useful for everyday life, and may very well be a waste of resources if we examine things from purely economic perspectives, but it has tremendous cultural and aesthetic cachet.