Yes, just about all the ideas that work for Mars also work on the Moon. About the only thing the Moon doesn’t have is the CO2 - but that’s actually more of a nuisance gas to be got rid of in a space habitat. If you have to import any food at all, you are going to have an excess of CO2 which is also a trace gas in the atmosphere anyway, just kilograms for a habitat. If you have one month supply of food, then you have plenty of carbon for future crops from the CO2 you breathe out while eating them. And it turns out that the Moon probably has at least millions of tons of CO2, also ammonia (for nitrogen) and hundreds of millions of tons of water ice at the poles.
The Moon is actually resource rich in many ways, possibly more so than Mars. The spacesuits designed to keep out Mars dust also keep out lunar dust - the problem is similar. The Mars dust may be more toxic actually with the perchlorates and possibly worst reactive chemicals in the dust.
The Moon actually may have some commercial value by way of returned materials while the ideas for Mars are to pay for the colonization mainly by export of ideas from Mars to Earth - which I find rather implausible. The Moon is far safer than Mars. You can have lifeboats ready to get back to Earth in 2 days. There’s a huge difference between 2 days and 2 years which is how long it would take to get back from Mars in an emergency in worst case if it happened as you are leaving Earth orbit on trajectory to Mars, too late to get back. Well for Earth it would be four days in that situation approx, like Apollo 13.
And you can launch a resupply mission to the Moon at any time. You can only launch to Mars every two years. It’s orders of magnitudes safer to go to the Moon and in one comparison after another, the Moon stacks up as easier than Mars.
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Also for someone who cares for astrobiology and the search for life then the Moon is a place we can’t mess up easily. Introduced non native microbes can’t spread and grow over the entire planet if it has habitats as may be the case for Mars and so confusing the search for life and maybe causing other problems too.
We can make mistakes on the Moon first, and meanwhile explore Mars robotically and eventually once it is safe, from orbit. I wouldn’t make a decision about whether to land humans on the surface until we know a whole lot more about Mars and the effects of Earth life on Mars. We have made so many mistakes here on Earth and this could turn out to be our biggest one. And if we make a mistake with an entire planet, there is no way at all you can reverse it. You can’t remove a problem microbe from a planet, noway nohow. So I think we need to know, not just guess, but have a really good understanding of what the effects might be before considering sending humans to the Mars surface.
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