Well the Russians (or our slavic brothers
) have always had the edge in space exploration, even now after the collapse of the USSR, NASA actually bought the plans for a 20 year old russian rocket engine that offers a 30% better force to weight ratio than the best engines the americans every developed... and this masterpiece was sitting in an old abandoned warehouse ont he outskirts of Moscow for lack of funding in space exploration.
That aside... back to Mars: I still say the only real obstacle to Mars colonization is politics and the lack of will power... heck 20 years before they went to the moon we barely discovered the jet engine! When Kennedy proposed the idea there were large portions of the so called scientific community that called him a "very optimistic war-monger" that didnīt know what heīs talking about... their most serious objection was that if anyone ever tried to land on the moon they (and their Rocket-ship) would sink in the soft sandy surface never able to get free again.... LOL
The thing is that there are always problems... if there wereīt any someone would have already done it. The challenge is to go for it and try to do it. Donīt try to solve every problem on the blackboard, thatīs crazy and sadly thatīs how nasa operates now... and its also the reason why the russians were alaways ahead with 1/10th of the USA resources.
I mean why the hell would rotating ships be a problem... there is no reason for it... just bring a big wheel into space, spin it around and you have a rotating ship... I mean asteroids spin all the time and they have no problems with space travel
heeh, jokes aside, there will always be people who say something is not possible and that we should wait... I say try and do it now and see if it cannot be done.
Capitalism really canot explore space... because every capitalistic country thinks in terms of money gains and not in terms of human advancement... but the Soviets saw the big picture, sadly the largest social experiment in human history didnīt work out so well because of human flaws and enemies aborad and within