Is Colonizing Mars an Imperative? Obama's New Space Strategy Says "Yes"

[Stefan]

Is there one place for Zapatero in the mission?

Not on the same ship with Chavez.

[Phil75231]

If resources are the issue, it's more worthwhile to go to the asteroid belt. You'd have to fight gravity to get resources off a planet, whereas you don't in an asteroid belt.

Even under the best of circumstances, colonizing Mars will be a tremendous challenge. Even with sealed domes in the craters, even if we do get sufficient water, even if we do manage to shield ourselves from the radiation reaching the surface and many other things - Martian "soil" has practically NO organic matter. This makes it pretty hard if you plant to grow food there, if not outright impossible. Imagine how many tons of organic matter you have to have to fertilize even 10 hectares of land (about 25 ac., IIRC). Can't get nutrients from what's essentially ground up rock and little else. That means that, unless we find a literal treasure trove of carbon and nitrogen, any Martian colony will be a small outpost at most. Maybe the asteroid belt will yield some carbon, but that's still more expense added to the effort.

Given all this, I expect the first "colonists" to be intelligent robots, with effective radiation sheilding - probably as construction crews and miners.