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by bpodgursky 3430 days ago
To an extent, this research is being done because

(1) It's fairly cheap, compared to real R&D and

(2) There's nothing else to do in the meantime. Without big budget shifts, or big tech breakthroughs, there's no realistic path to a (NASA) manned Mars mission anytime soon.

So there's fiddling around the edges of the problem in the interim.