Whats the most challenging aspect of settling Mars?
Project Virgle has many challenging aspects, from the need for technologies that can deal with low temperatures and highly dusty terrains bathed in debilitating ultraviolet radiation to the insanely complex logistics of maintaining a viable food chain, heavy manufacturing and a scalable Earth-Mars transport system. But, as is the case for human civilization on Earth, Virgle’s long term success (or grisly, horrific failure) will depend to a large degree on a single linchpin: Energy. We’ll need to produce and manage enough energy to sustain the initial missions and begin in-situ resource utilization and fabrication and the expansion of the initial settlements.
