We are.
I wrote a long napkin math post about Earth-Mars versus Earth-moon-Mars transfer costs and then I realised yeah you probably could just huck shit from the moon (like with a damn trebuchet now that I think of it) into an Earth parking orbit pretty cheaply.
There's aluminum on the moon. And silicon refineries need a vacuum and environments with no contaminants. Maybe some of that stuff would be easier on the moon? I've read some sci fi and old NASA documents about using the moon as a pit stop. Your post too. Find more ice and you can make hydrogen to gas up a larger rocket that takes less fuel to break from the 1/6th gravity on the moons.
Main practical reason is that mars has lower gravity and is closer to the asteroid belt. We know of multiple asteroids that contain more gold, iron, nickel and whatever else you might think of than there is on earth.
This is what it's intended to do. SpaceX still hasn't solved the fuel transfer problem, although they are said to be close to in-flight testing of their design.
Just tell them its so we can get away from niggers, theyll understand. But beyond that I think that its inevitable. We eventually moved beyond our tiny islands and we will eventually move beyond this planet. Im sure there were people crying about wasting money on discovering new lands back then too. There were so many lives and resources lost on these trips.
Just to see if we can. There doesn't have to be a reason but to do it for its own sake. Why did people summit the tallest mountains? Every endevour like this gives us so many incredible technologies as a side effect, even recontextualizing past knowledge to apply to other problems.
How many materials alone are we using in everyday devices because the space age required them? A small example, I have a pocket knife with 154CM stainless steel. It was developed in 1959 for the Air Force for high temperature applications. NASA was founded in 1959. This is a special steel made in a complete vacuum, while held in place using magnets during smelting. That's just a single example, we need challenges to make materials to meet those challenges.
I hope this launch works. The most important thing is that it gets off the pad since any problems afterwards can be quickly remedied. However, the pad took forever to build. I don't think people realize how big of a deal this launch is since the previous versions of the rocket were purely test vehicles that were never meant to actually carry cargo while Starship 3.0 can be put into service once the inevitable gremlins in the system are found and fixed.
Hopefully they made the pad more durable too. This thing puts out so much force that previous tests vaporized the launch platforms.
Wright Patterson is home of the Air Force Research Laboratory that does research and development of air weapons. So you can thank the Cold War for both stainless steel and NASA.
