See also Idlewords’ essays “Why not Mars” and “The shape of a Mars mission”

https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

““”Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.“””

and his article l’affair siloxane:

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane

And Charles Stross’ “The High Frontier Redux” (2007)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high...

“”” Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.””””