Eli5: Why is Earth’s moon often the top candidate for the attempted establishment of a human colony in space?
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The first time you go camping, you’re probably going to go to one of those established sites with showers and toilets and numbered campsites. You learn a lot about camping that way. You get used to setting up camp, cooking on a camping stove or over a fire pit, and sleeping in the great outdoors.
Where do you go from there? Maybe it’s a campground without showers and toilets. Maybe it’s a hike into the woods or up a mountain to the site. The things learned from your early camping experiences carry over and prepare you for a more remote camping experience.
The moon is sort of like the earlier scenario. It’s a stepping stone towards a more remote location. You can get to the moon on a couple days. You can launch at anytime to get there. It’s relatively easy. Mars is months away, and you can only launch when the orbits of the two planets are in the right spot. The moon is car camping, mars is everest camp 3.
Did anybody boil it down to location?
In short, it takes about three days to travel between Earth and the Moon. And we can *more or less* launch a rocket to the Moon at any time. Its distance from us doesn’t change *that* much.
Compare this to the next closest candidate, Mars: Getting there takes 9 months *in the best case*. In addition to this, because Mars is in a separate orbit around the sun, it’s only occasionally close to us. It spends a good chunk of its time at the opposite side of the sun from us. So if we want to get to Mars in *only* 9 months, we have to launch within very specific launch windows. How often do those occur? About once every 26 months.
So with a colony on the Moon we can send supplies fairly quickly if needed. We can react to emergencies. The people on living on the Moon could evacuate at almost any time if needed. Heck, while it would be expensive to do so, a colonist could even head back to Earth for a vacation or to see their family. That’d be basically impossible if they were on Mars. If an accident happens on Mars and they need unscheduled supplies sent, better hope they can hold out a year or two. And if they ever need to evacuate, well, tough luck. They’re not coming back to Earth. It’s just not doable.
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