Once there’s a fully space-based supply chain up and running using materials from the asteroid belt, I strongly question the utility of a Moon colony. Any resource you could find on the Moon that would be necessary to get us out there would also be available in the asteroid belt, and once there’s a pipeline of extraction, processing, and manufacturing in space, there’d be no reason to make an extra stop on the SURFACE of the Moon except to drop off resources for people already living there. It’d be an economic atavism at that point.

Now, using planets and moons for their gravity to park space stations and perform slingshot-type maneuvers, that makes a lot of sense. But we’re all still so stuck in our 20th century imaginations of space colonization being like, idk, settling the Plains but on Mars we can’t think through what a space-based economy would actually look like.

The book’s exploration of what cIty oN mArS would look like is insipid at best. If people settled Mars for some insane reason, it would look like the Expanse – miserable, desperate, nobody lives on the surface, and as soon as the space based economy hits a certain point of development it would be pointless and everyone would realize it. You might have rich people building vacation homes there for the views, that’s it.

Why tf would you figure out how to cope with Lunar and Martian regolith when you could just not?