I understand that the article is trying to promote robotic space explorations over human one. But we are humans, and even if a robot could do things better than us, people doing those things inspire more people.
Having said I do agree that going to Mars has lot of risks and would require decades of cooperation between different governments. Which is why I think it's better and feasible to build a moon base/city first.
The moon is only 3 days far which would make space tourism really feasible. The close proximity would be helpful in engineering, healthcare, entertainment etc. Lastly a proper city on moon can be a source of a lot of technological advancements and also a source of immense inspiration for all of humanity.
I would put it in orbit around the Moon. There’s not much on the Moon, other than regolith at the bottom of a relatively shallow gravity well I guess. If you expect the Moon to be a stopover in space tourism, don’t make the people go down the gravity well, that’s a waste of energy for everyone who wants to visit it.
We could treat the Moon as a particularly large asteroid-mining process, don’t live on it, just extract resources.
I don’t think there’s much point in learning to live on all these different rocks. Most of space is space, we should focus on learning to live in space.
Having said I do agree that going to Mars has lot of risks and would require decades of cooperation between different governments. Which is why I think it's better and feasible to build a moon base/city first.
The moon is only 3 days far which would make space tourism really feasible. The close proximity would be helpful in engineering, healthcare, entertainment etc. Lastly a proper city on moon can be a source of a lot of technological advancements and also a source of immense inspiration for all of humanity.