[dsp1234]

much simpler designs

Simpler than a water reservoir and regolith sandbags? The former is required anyways, since people will need water, and the later is about as simple as it comes (we use sandbags here on earth all the time for impromptu buildings).

[avar]

There's a world of difference between trying to build a house on Mars, and trying to build a house whose every external wall is a water tank, having that water tank also be an active water source (as opposed to a frozen block of ice) is going to be a construction and maintenance / cleaning nightmare.

Even just regolith sandbags are going to suck, instead of just having your roof be a simple pressure vessel it's now going to also have to withstand tons of sandbags and water tanks.

And that's before we get to the problem of trying to either ship all of this extra water mass over, or trying to mine it locally, or the construction logistics of piling up hundreds of tons of sand.

All of this will be needed eventually, but it's absurd that NASA is trying to get in the way of Mars colonization by setting these overly conservative safety requirements which'll significantly hinder initial colonization efforts.

[Pica_soO]

Eh- the structure carrying problem- was kind of answered in your own post. We regularly build roads out of ice- and ice infused with carbon has the strength of steel. So frozen beams of water carrying the sandbags it is?

Also - the simple designs have a problem here- they are not easily repairable with local materials. And as you can see on any airplane- those simple soda can designs- wear out pretty fast, if pressure changes regularly. So, yeah- its a simpler design as in - simpler on earth to maintain, but on Mars its going to blow up like Mark Rodneys Potatoefarm from stress around the airlocks.

[avar]

We regularly build lots of heavy and complicated things, building them on Mars is going to be a problem. The biggest thing we've shipped there so far is the size of a small car.

The process of colonizing Mars should be that we realistically look at how much payload we can send up there, how much it costs, and then we find some adventurers willing to take risks to go.

I don't think it's unrealistic to say as a first approximation that the first people to land on Mars can expect a 10% chance of dying by just trying to get there, and 30% of dying early due to some complications, e.g. radiation exposure.

Those would have been fantastic odds when the New World was first colonized, or when soldiers landed on Omaha beach. Colonizing Mars needs to be looked at like that, not in terms of sending some government employee into a dangerous situation, as if though they're going to repair some machinery here on Earth.

Instead, NASA views their rules on safety as immutable, and is coming up with designs for habitats and ships to satisfy those rules, without ever having the discussion that perhaps those rules are unreasonable given the endeavour.