[Off-topic] Going to Mars: Luna as stepstone?

My $0.02: Langrange point way more useful than moon, unless we spend an unholy amount of money on lunar mining an manufacture.

In long run, moon infrastructure > no moon infrastructure, but I doubt the public is willing to stomach a commitment of resources multiple times higher than the whole Saturn program.

Though not simulated in game yet, EM-gun propulsion has pretty high exhaust velocities, making lunar dust a viable propellant. Nuclear fuel would have to be imported from Earth, ofc.

Not sure.

First, there was evidence for last decades that NASA could never manage it. It has only become increasingly certain in recent years. The Senate Launch System/Cislunar Station is going to eat its entire Go To Mars budget for pretty much nothing of substance.

So, who else may get there?
Elon Musk is aiming at it. As such, if he is against, then he will probably go for Mars directly.
OTOH, ESA has plans to put a manned outpost on the Moon (with the help of anyone willing, which may include the Chinese), and intends to invite industrials along. So someone may very well decide to start manufacture propellant and simple ship parts there, at which point anyone (Musk or some non-US space agency) may use them to help go to Mars.

Then again at some point someone may decide "screw it I'm going for a nuclear engine" and just skip the Moon entirely. Or someone may decide "screw it I'm making a fusion torch", while we're at it. After all, both fusion and Mars have been in twenty years for more decades than most of us have been alive.

Indeed. Mars is a pretty much worthless dustball wasteland, and that's before taking into account that maybe 1/3 gravity do to a long-term population.
Still, going there would still be a good idea for scientific research and everything we can learn with having an outpost on another world, out of no-delay light range.
Oh wait no, it's actually a terrible idea. If there was or still is life there, the last thing you want to do is to send messy, biological humans and their microbe-crawling ecosystem there. When (not if) some of that mess escapes (and assuming it doesn't destroy the existing life/fossils while developing) and start living there, it will become impossible to tell if whatever we find later is Martian native or from Earth.

Luna could still be colonised, in the sense that we've colonised the seas or Antarctica: there are some people living there, but it's close enough from Earth civilisation that you can come back for family and such.

If we are serious about developing long-term population settlements in the System, there are many better places. Mercury, Titan, Callisto, any number of asteroids... Mars simply isn't worth it for settlement.


Also Mars always rebels so it never ends well. Those damn entitled, backwater redboots, that's easy for them to "declare independence" and forget the vast resources we put into developing their entire infrastructure grumble Aldrin dome was an inside job anyway grumble

Another typical Terran with their soul held down by gravity! I bet you are mad because you don't have anymore irreplaceable biological species to accidentally wipe out or eat to death! The British Empire wined about all the resources when the Americans rebelled, and guess what the British empire was wrong and tyrannical and so is the Earthgov! Stay on Earth that little mud ball of a planet is doomed anyways!  

Yep. Centrifuge. On Earth we use them to simulate acceleration during rocket launch.

And you have to either keep the entire mechanism airtight or resistant to Mars dust and grit.
It would be significantly easier on the Moon (and Earth proximity may help), but the simplest by far is still free-floating/asteroid rotating habitats (note that spinning the entire asteroid would, with very few exceptions, simply disperse it. But you can either build a centrifuge inside the asteroid, next to it while mining the asteroid for materials, or transform the entire asteroid into something hard so you can spin it)