It’s just not possible for the near future. Imagine you set up a colony on the top of Mount Everest. Now make that a mountain 30 kilometers tall instead of just 8.848 km tall. Now add in solar storms (far more radiation than you’d get after an all out nuclear war, needing bunkers where you are covered in thick layers of radiation shielding to survive) and temperatures so cold that dry ice forms at night for a third of the year. Also make it extremely dry, there is some ice but it is hard to extract. And no oxygen in the atmosphere. That’s more hospitable than Mars.
Do you think you could survive there independently of Earth? Or want to? Even with all the ideas of 3D printers and ingenious ways of using resources, all the ideas would be far easier to do in a desert almost anywhere on Earth, or in Antarctica or remote islands - there are large areas of uninhabited land on Earth. Uninhabited because, though technically we could perhaps live there, it would be so difficult and expensive, nobody sees the point in doing so. And to live in such a place as that, even Antarctica, which is much more hospitable than Mars or the Moon, you need the support of many people living in more hospitable places to support one person in Antarctica. You just wouldn’t have enough hours in the day to do everything that needed to be done if you have to make your own spacesuits, your own environment control system, your own tools, components, radio, LCDs, microchips, etc etc.
Just a spacesuit is a complex piece of equipment like a mini spacesuit that costs of order two million dollars to build, not including design costs, see Robert Walker's answer to How much does a spacesuit cost?
I think it is well possible that we have settlement on the Moon in the near future. But I think it will be like a base in Antarctica, that in such an inhospitable environment, we are there with support many to one from people on Earth because what they do is of value to Earth, including pure research and quite possibly some mining of materials such as water to export to LEO and eventually metals perhaps for Earth.
Also, a place for tourists and wealthy people from Earth to visit, to see the craters, mountains, maybe vast caves, ice at the poles, and to enjoy the low gravity. Location for making movies. Perhaps a place for exotic sports like human flight (which should be possible on the Moon). Maybe just as we have winter olympics now, in the future we may have lunar olympics with astronauts training and competing on the Moon. A place for art and music works. There could be many reasons to be there in additional to the many reasons for research.
But I don’t see just going there as a place to live much like you would migrate to somewhere else on Earth is at all feasible in the near future. And as for Mars, even less so, as it has planetary protection issues, and it’s most interesting studied from orbit at least for as long as we can’t find a biologically reversible way to send humans to the surface.
It might be possible in the future. But if we can live sustainably in space, it would be far easier to apply the same ideas to Earth, without the spacesuits and the thick layers of radiation shielding and habitats engineered to withstand tons per square meter outwards pressure, and environment control systems and need to generate all our own oxygen to breathe instead of just opening a window or adding some ventilation to our houses to let the air in. For instance, we could do this in the middle of a desert, using materials from the desert sand and rocks and from the air itself (which would count as rich in resources such as oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, water vapour etc by space standards), or in the sea, using just sea water and the atmosphere and a few rocks dredged up from the sea floor. If we can do that, we then might have a chance of setting up self sustaining colonies in space, as a much more difficult but perhaps feasible proposition. Before we can do that, no chance.
So until then, any astronauts in space settlements are pretty much totally dependent on Earth to keep going. You could give them supplies for decades, even for a century, or centuries. That’s possible. But not to keep going indefinitely into the indefinite future.
So, to make your scenario possible, assume that somehow they have got hold of not just ability to make their own food and oxygen etc, but have managed to stash a pile of spacesuits, and computer chips, and replacement components, enough to last them for a century. Perhaps on Earth they were all multi-billionaires and they used their wealth to set up this place on the Moon or wherever. In that situation, yes, it would be feasible in principle, but rather stupid. I can’t see this as a likely future scenario.
See also my Case For Moon First, available to read free online, also available for kindle
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