Going on to Mars with a single vehicle is a recipe for a disaster for the manned space program! There will BE NO Apollo 13 type of rescue, some millions of miles from the Earth on the way towards Mars! And then we can all be treated to an even greater media circus than the recent death of Michael Jackson! We would get to watch (if some kind of a failure at least left the astronauts alive for awhile) while these truly great and good people slowly died!! And then we could kiss any manned space efforts goodbye probably forever!
If that IS what you want, then by all means let us just try and go to Mars right away! Because a certain Mr. Murphy and his laws would then see to it that is what we would get!!! :x
But if we do go on to Mars in an intelligent manner, we will sent a large enough of a fleet of space vehicles that if one (or even two) should break down, the supplies and people of the others would be able to take up the slack (and the people and supplies that would otherwise be lost forever in the crippled ship) and make sure that the mission was completed!
But how can this be done without spending literally $trillions of tax dollars?
The answer lies on the moon! Not only should we go back to the moon for far further exploration of that closest and most interesting cosmic neighbor to us. After all, if you were to give a fast and slight exploration of the San Fernando Valley, you might just have what we did in the Apollo program. But, the moon has the approximate land area of the continents of Africa and Australia put together. Would you then say that we have even begun a full exploration of that much territory? If you did, then I have a certain bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell someone as smart as you are!
Just how many people have walked on the hidden side of the moon? Exactly zero. Not the "Dark side", that is the kind of uneducated thing that we sometimes get even on such a site as this, it is NOT dark, it is merely hidden from our eyes on the Earth!
But, the main reason for going back to the moon before going on further out is that the materials of the moon are just what would be needed to inexpensively build the infrastructure of a manned space civilization, including the fleets of vehicles needed to safely and reliably go out to Mars and even beyond!
And I am not even talking about the possibility of water, uranium, or helium 3. What I am talking about is iron, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, manganese, and many of the other space age materials just lying on the surface in the lunar regolith. This along with some 45% of the lunar regolith being the oxygen that binds of these various materials into their constituent oxides. We know these materials are there in easily mined quantities from the legacy of the materials brought back from all six sites by the Apollo astronauts. And what a wonderful legacy that was!!!
These materials could either be then smelted on the moon and literally thrown off its surface by a linear mass launcher as the moons gravity is only 0.16 that of the Earth's, with no atmosphere to burn up the materials when so launched!
Or they could just be mined and then thrown off the moon to be totally processed in space itself, with its ease of gravity and almost limitless quantity of energy directly from the sun itself!
I know that going back to the moon and doing this is in itself going to cost a lot, but when it is done, it will make the costs of future manned space ventures far, far less expensive, safer, and more reliable in the long run!
And THAT is why going to the moon is ALL important to both the future of a true space faring civilization, and eventually the fate of humanity itself!!
Is that explanation understandable?