Eli5: Why is Earth’s moon often the top candidate for the attempted establishment of a human colony in space?
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Its wayyyy closer
If something goes wrong, you can hop into a ship, blast off, and only need 3 days of oxygen to safely make it back to Earth from the Moon
Launch tables from Mars to Earth aren’t readily available, but from Earth to Mars takes 120-220 days depending on when in the launch window and how strong the rocket is. Mars would basically need to keep a full year’s worth of supplies somewhere super duper safe. If something goes wrong and they need to bail but those supplies were damaged/destroyed there’s no coming home, just dying in the darkness of space
We always do test runs close by. They test out Mars rovers in a desert in Chile because its a close approximation and wayyyy easier to access than Mars itself and if something goes wrong they can just fly a spare part in next week. Prototypes and proof of concept always stay close because the assumption for the first run is that something will go wrong, and if nothing goes wrong then it wasn’t an adequate test
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