Oh, it's gonna happen, you just wait and see. Also, everyone is going to be slim and trim again.

Escape velocity from earth is over 11 km/s. Escape velocity from the moon is less than 2.5 km/s. That is a huge difference.

Launching a partially fueled deep space exploration vessel (destined for Mars, Venus, asteroid etc.) and refueling in lunar orbit before going on greatly reduces the amount of fuel needed to launch from earth, making the vessel smaller / cheaper.

But establishing a lunar fuel processing depot (using lunar polar ice, converted to oxygen and hydrogen) only makes sense if you have a robust deep space exploration program.

I find it pretty funny that a show that came out in 1975 (Space: 1999) was predicting that humanity would have these large complex colonies on the moon in just 24 years.

We could/would have if we hadn't just given up on doing more than dangling our tootsies in the water after having swam across the Atlantic.

It was an alternate universe where we went to the moon in the 1700's.
At least that is my story and I am sticking to it.


Wheels

Meh, who cares about space travel when the real technological breakthroughs are in the robot sex doll industry. Sexy fembots going mainstream is going to be the biggest game changer in human history!

I love going to Goodwills and finding space travel books from the 70's and 80's, usually nice large hardcover books like you'd find in a public library.

Here's a quote from "Space" (1980, 1985) under "Exploring the Planets"...

"The first attempt at interplanetary travel will certainly be a flight to Mars. Blueprints already exist for an initial mission. The plan is to send a combined crew of 12 aboard two spacecraft. Using a trajectory designed to burn a minimum of fuel, the shortest journey time to Mars will be 270 days. On arrival, both ships will enter parking orbits around the planet, remaining there for about 80 days. During this time small landing craft will ferry crew members between mother ships and the surface.

Despite the fact that so far the United States Congress has made no funds available for the mission, NASA officials are hopeful that the first landings on Mars will be made early in the next century. There is some speculation that the Soviets are planning a manned Mars mission to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution."

Heh. Russia wishes it had the money to splurge on something like that now!

SpaceX will be there to greet them when they arrive.

Once they get these sex robots right I'll never get any work done.

Hmm...has me thinking...

That 270 days to get to Mars is a mighty long time for a young and physically fit astronaut. I wonder if NASA is working on its own sex robots? They could serve as actual scientific worker robots but could also serve a more human purpose when needed.

Most likely you'll be in cryosleep for most of the duration of the trip.

They might have cryosleep worked out by the time NASA is ready to make the trip to Mars. I don't think it will be ready by the time SpaceX goes, though...

Pretty good prediction on NASA's part. If they manage to do it around the 2030's as currently hoped, but the Orion capsule and SLS are pretty far along in development already.

If the gov't had turned the funds loose and let NASA & industry use them as they saw fit, we could be close to going the way the First Hundred did in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars."

My prediction is SLS will never fly, more than once or twice anyway. It is now projected to cost $20 Billion before first flight, plus another 20 billion for Orion.

Falcon 9 Heavy and Dragon are almost ready to fly now and have cost only a fraction as much for equal capability.

Continuing to pour money into SLS / Orion just to keep workers working in a few select congressional districts is insanity.

On some levels I agree with you - as I mentioned before I think we aimed for manned Mars missions too soon and would have been better off waiting for technology to evolve more. The rate at which tech is evolving is far crazier now than it was even just 15 years ago, and it's only accelerating. I think we're still able to do a lot more for the money with unmanned craft - not in terms of Mars itself (no "drone" is going to do the kind of research/experimentation a human crew could, at least not YET!), but throw that kind of money at multiple unmanned missions to multiple planets, moons, etc and I think we'd gain far more knowledge overall for the same money.

If Columbus had waited for steamships...........

My contribution to such a great leap for all humankind. We just need to take the torch and run with it to beyond Near Earth Orbit and our Moon.

Barely an analogy though.

Columbus thought (even upon "discovering" the Americas - Leif Erikson had done so prior, and humanity itself had done so millennia prior) that he had hit Asia. He even insisted on it after knowing otherwise. The discovery of "new lands" didn't suit his agenda, or his financiers (at least at first).

It was pure serendipity.

He did not even know where he was going. Not to take anything away from the fact that in 1492 terms he was a GENIUS sailor - even in modern terms that man could and would school most people on this!

Going back to "topic" though - had he "waited for steamships"? He probably wouldn't be in the history books. But humanity at large would have still progressed, and someone else's name would be in those books.

The voyages of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were certainly no trifling matter. Big balls, and at least Columbus and more had to have some big brain behind such an endeavor (or total insanity!).

But spaceflight isn't done like that - it's not "Let's just DO IT GODDAMMIT!" (and neither was Columbus's voyages, but when you compare the two, yes there was more of that for sure!)