Space Travel...Or, Where Do We Go From Here?

I just read an article about Elon Musks' ambitious dream of colonizing Mars. I expect many people wish him well in his quest. I know I do...but there is one point everyone seems to miss when discussing the endeavor:

1) The only type of propulsion system we have is a rocket...since the ancient Chinese invented gun powder, mankind has adapted highly volatile ingredients to provide the thrust to get from point A to point B. The drawback to using "fossil fuels" to explore even the neighboring planets, let alone actually gaining the title of Space Faring Race, is that fossil fuels are a one shot deal. Burn up your stock of fuel, it's gone.

Elon Musk has one solution to that problem, build a gas station on Mars. The idea is to send up a number of missions whose sole purpose is to create/build the infrastructure to drill or mine the raw materials, and process it into usable fuel for return trips. Sounds like a plan, right?

The only problem in going that route is that you actually bypass the original problem...with our current technology, you can only go to one place (Mars) and back again. You would not be able to go anywhere else, unless you started back at square one again, and built another gas station at your next intended destination...kinda redundant, ain't it.

If Elon Musk were to actually listen to me, I would suggest he spend all his time and financial resources on developing multi use propulsion systems first. There are a number of possible systems being tossed around, that don't depend on "one shot" fuels. Unfortunately, they are all in the theory stage, with only one that I read about having been experimented with. So, it could be a few more years, at least, before we can look up at the stars and do more than dream about exploring the galaxy, like the characters in Star Trek do...

But to make laudable yet vain attempts, based upon crude "pipe bombs", to travel to the stars is analogous to having your horse push the wagon instead of pulling it...very expensive and fancy pipe bombs at that.