Moon is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative To Mars, NASA Chief Says (scientificamerican.com)

The moon has not superseded Mars as a human-spaceflight target, despite NASA's current focus on getting astronauts to Earth's nearest neighbor, agency officials stressed. From a report: The Red Planet remains the ultimate destination, and the moon will serve as a stepping stone along the way, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, and Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said during congressional hearings Wednesday. "The moon is the proving ground, and Mars is the goal," Bridenstine said during testimony before the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, part of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "The glory of the moon is that it's only a three-day journey home," Bridenstine added. "So, we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks, we can try all of the different maturations that are necessary to live and work on another world. And we can do it all at the moon, where, if there is a problem, if there is an emergency, we know that we can get people home." He cited NASA's Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which famously managed to make it safely back to Earth despite experiencing a serious problem on the way to the moon.

Comments

Earth is a stepping stone to the Moon

[Pfhorrest]

There's a lot of places on Earth that are a lot more hospitable than the Moon -- the middle of the Sahara, Antactica, the seafloor -- that are still pretty inaccessible to us. Yeah, we can get there, and with a continuous supply chain we can stay there a while, but we're not going to have a continuous supply chain to Mars. Whoever goes to Mars has to be able to make it there on their own. So we need to be able to at least have permanent self-sustaining settlements in the most inhospitable places on Earth, if we're ever going to have permanent self-sustaining settlements off-Earth.

And by the time we're able to do that, we've eliminated one of the biggest reasons to have people off-Earth in the first place, because if we have "colonies" on Earth that are capable of surviving Martian conditions, they'll also survive everything that could ever happen to Earth short of the death of the sun. Climate change? Nuclear holocaust? Giant meteor? Living in the aftermath of those is a cake walk compared to living on Mars.