Manned Mars Missions

Cheaper....

I think you and Elon Musk are on the same page.

https://youtu.be/0pPlYpbSMFU?t=257

This certainly is lofty and noble goal to work towards. However, I still think putting people on Mars is premature. The longest people have existed outside of the Van Allen belts is just under two weeks. IMHO A research colony on the Moon should be at least attempted before we commit to putting people out of Earth's orbit for about a year.

its a balmy -200F there, a light sweater should do

Well said.

In addition, the Moon would make a very nice 'staging platform' to reach out to the other planets from. Lower gravity means less fuel needed to reach escape velocity, which means more space/weight for cargo, or for more fuel to allow for a longer mission.

Plus, Lunar orbit isn't as 'littered' as Earth orbit is, and we can work to KEEP it clean, so orbiting construction facilities won't need as much protection from 'orbiting trash.'

Probably the best setup would be to have ground launches to one or more Earth Orbit stations, where the smaller, cheaper-to-launch payloads are collected and loaded into an 'Earth-Moon shuttle' which ferries the cargo to Lunar orbit stations, and from there, either ferried to the Lunar surface by a 'local shuttle' or used to assemble/stock/resupply the Interplanetary Mission Craft.

(What we REALLY need is development of the Unobtanium fibers that will allow construction of Space Elevators, so we don't need to keep launching vehicles that have to be 99% fuel just to reach Earth Orbit. However, true to its name, we will likely never develop/discover the Unobtanium we need for this. Oh well, it doesn't hurt to dream now and again.)

"after you come up with a reason", you need to come up with a GOOD reason.

Never seen a good one.

"Because it's there" just doesn't make it a good reason.

Learning about the origin of things still hasn't gotten off ground here on earth.

We still murder each other, and hate each other for no good reason.

Hell, we're still trying to destroy the Earth by injecting high pressure poisoned water into the crust without any idea of the long term implications of doing it.

Global warming????? Well, leaving out the oil we humans burn we still have no ideal about that either.

Let's figure out the planet we live on before spending trillions killing people in space.

The first space dock .... a la Star Trek