Right so we need to send some heroic looking astronaut types asap to hold the world hostage for re-supply missions. I agree.
No doubt you also want an ever growing number of highly skilled people to build things since they will doubtless be faster than remote operated stuff from earth. Plus you may as well make use of the infrastructure you're building.
But beyond that I don't see why you'd send people who will have a very real chance of over-burdening your infrastructure and dying possibly taking down others with them.
Plus building a remote operated robot factory on earth sounds like awesome fun, surprised no one seems interested! I don't see what other open hardware & software project could make a bigger difference to human space colonization.
Round-trip to mars is between 5 and 45 minutes. "remote operation" is much more like automation.
The Curiosity rover has traveled 9 miles in 4 years and is remotely operated. That sort of statistic shows a little bit of how a human on mars could be many orders of magnitude more productive.
To be fair, we need to be able to answer the hard questions before making things a reality. Going to mars and making it habitable is not exactly something we have a lot of experience in, so there are a lot of questions but very little reasonable solutions.
I personally think we should go as soon as possible and I would love to see a lot more competition in this area. Maybe if China starts making major progress towards mars then probably the head will start rolling in the USA and maybe even Europe.
No doubt you also want an ever growing number of highly skilled people to build things since they will doubtless be faster than remote operated stuff from earth. Plus you may as well make use of the infrastructure you're building.
But beyond that I don't see why you'd send people who will have a very real chance of over-burdening your infrastructure and dying possibly taking down others with them.
Plus building a remote operated robot factory on earth sounds like awesome fun, surprised no one seems interested! I don't see what other open hardware & software project could make a bigger difference to human space colonization.