5 thoughts on ““It Would Be Cool To Be Born On Earth…””

  1. Mars has the appearance of destination where you live the rest of your life- it’s going West in the covered wagon.
    One tends not to think covered wagon to the West followed by red eye to New York.

    I am of the opinion that one should make rocket fuel on the Moon before colonizing Mars. But also don’t think of a NASA manned Mars as colonization of Mars- though I think such mission should lead to Mars becoming settled.
    I wouldn’t say that manned exploration of Mars requires rocket fuel first made on the Moon. In regards to NASA, I think NASA should first go to the Moon to determine if rocket fuel can be made commercially on the moon, and finding would relate to whether or how Mars can be settled.
    If lunar water is not minable [profitable to mine], then I think NASA should other ways in which Mars could be settled.
    Or find perhaps some other way to have hundreds of thousand of tonnes of rocket fuel in earth orbit [Cislunar] at low cost.

    Or part of exploration of Moon, Mars, Mercury, whatever and etc, should be to find way to to enable future human settlements.
    One doesn’t absolutely need chemical rocket fuel. If you had nuclear orions that could be another way, perhaps.

    I think if NASA does not explore Mars, and instead Musk is first, then the focus of Musk should be the same- explore Mars first. And on mars you also need something like capability to make rocket fuel. Plus other things, like how one can grow food on Mars.
    The idea of shipping rocket fuel from Earth for human settlement seems similar to shipping food from earth for settlement- either or both is fine in terms exploration, and being overly involved with either or both in terms of production could distraction from exploration, but not so with settlement.

    1. Oxygen baked out of just about any lunar rocks will be a viable commodity the moment we decide to send a ship BEO. We just need a few ships in orbit to create the market.

  2. Coupla big steps to get where we belong, The Belt. What we need now is a functional robotic prospector. Show that there are goodies out there, and they will come.

    1. The problem with the belt is those rocks aren’t very close to one another (all those quarters played in that 70s asteroid game now wasted!) They would seem to need to start building infrastructure spreading out from one of the big rocks. This is a lot harder than just staking a claim on mars or even the moon.

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