I think the asteroid landing plan is a smart one over the Mars goal. I think we're more obsessed with Mars than is due -- asteroids offer a wealth of potential resources without the immense cost of dropping into and climbing out of a planetary gravity well. Even a landing on one of Mars' fake-moons would be a better choice than Mars itself. Assuming we don't inadvertently open up the gates to hell or something like that...
Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.
Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?
What’s great about those asteroid landings is that they are relatively easy and nevertheless exciting enough. Much more exciting than the ISS or anything happening in low earth orbit. I think that’s the most important purpose of manned spaceflight. Robots will be able to tell you pretty much everything about geology, water and the potential of life on Mars.
A robot cannot stand on the tallest volcano of the solar system and tell you how it felt.
Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.
The goal is to put humans on Mars (and every other place). We must focus on what we need to learn to make that happen. Asteroids and the Moon seem good steps in that direction.
Fake because they're probably just captured asteroids. Counts as a moon, but not quite as cool.
And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important.
I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself.
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.
