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On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong.

I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.

“Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way.

The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.

> you can make new technology in one day.

Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it.

People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong.

Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.

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Note that Mars’ surface has a similar radiation dose as ISS, as measured by the Curiosity rover. (This includes the quality factor.)
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