Re: Moon versus Mars
There will never be a base on Mars until we have a base on the Moon. There's just too much involved that has to be both right and repeatable before it can happen, and at least with a Moon base we're only a day or three away at any one time. A catastrophic failure on a Moon base can be evacuated with little warning, and the worst that will happen is the moonmen will land dehydrated. A Mars base, evacuation ships would have to be constantly be ready for an evacuation that might last as long as 3 years, so there would be no evacuation. So far, we've not even been able to make an independent biodome work on Earth, and Mars would absolutely need to be independent from the word go. A lot was learned about building a biodome including what can go wrong with the Biodome 2 project, but we didn't learn enough to try for Mars yet. The Moon is the logical next step for non-Earth living.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2