China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover 'declared dead', page 2

reply to post by JadeStar

Bang for the buck. What's the point of another rover to the moon? We're looking for life and resources to "live off of the land" on Mars.

If we believe the NASA images and data, what land is there on Mars to live off? How can sending men so far as Mars be more profitable or useful than sending them to the Moon? Another rover? Mars has had at least 5 now and how many more? These are expensive and too far away to recover or fix.

As others have said,
a) Moon science is not that advanced yet. We dont understand rilles, we dont understand many of the other surface features found on the Moon.
b) As a location for a base station, the Moon makes a lot of sense. Costs are lower, communications quicker. Deep space travel does not need to first escape from the Earth's atmosphere.
c) There is a possibility we will be able to arrive at the Moon to help our guys if something goes wrong. No such help would be available to Mars.
d) There are still useful materials available on the Moon, should any company or organisation want to extract them.

I suspect the focus on Mars is either because there are counntries who are getting close to getting to the Moon or else there is some other reason why the Moon is not the next logical place to go. Maybe someone could ask NASA and see what they say, but I doubt you will get much common sense as a reply?

There are far more logical reasons to develop the Moon than to go off to explore Mars.