In my opinion sending supplies every month or whatever from earth
is useless. A waste of time and money. That gets us no closer to being able to make a Mars colony Because with mars, it won’t be so easy.
We need to be able to create an entirely self sustained ecosystem that doesn’t rely on outside resources
Like the biosphere 2. We should be running more experiments. We should make a biosphere on the moon, but I haven’t seen any plans for that
Otherwise the first Martians will be 6 months away from help and be absolutely screwed when something inevitably goes wrong with their oxygen supply or water supply or power supply.
In my opinion, the first 20ish Mars missions should be about week long stays on the planet, not for gathering data or samples or pictures, but for starting the new biosphere. Building a new habitat.
If the first groups of people who go to Mars DONT do that, then Mars will just be like the moon was 60 years ago. We will send a few people, they will do nothing productive, and then we won’t send anyone ever again
We only put people on the moon for 3 years, and they built nothing productive besides achievement. And after just a few dozen people walked on the moon, humanity seemed to agree that continuing to send people to the moon to jump around and take photos was a waste of money and a risk of lives. We are setting up for Mars to be the same way, especially NASA’s Orion mission. It will probably be short lived. A difference this time is SpaceX, an independent company, but even SpaceX won’t just waste money for nothing. So if we don’t start getting our shit together and planning, and testing enclosed ecosystems, Mars will be a short lived, overhyped waste of time and money, aside from the new Boy Scout badge it will earn humanity. And before you come yelling at me with “do you think the moon was a waste of time,” I will say this. The space program at the time of the moon missions actually advanced all of our space programs, and advanced us forward in many technological ways. Sending a dude to Mars just to say we did it doesn’t advance our technology as a species