Do you think the USA should attempt to send a manned flight to Mars? Apollo gave us huge benefits, will Mars?
Question:
The rewards from a manned mission to Mars could be just as big.
What do you think about the prospect of sending a team to Mars?
Answer:
I think that a return to space is inevitable, and will reap enormous benefits in our understanding of ecology, medicine, electronics, propulsion and power generation, food production, and a host of other areas that we can only guess at from this side of the process.
Mars is a good goal, simply because, as JFK said, "it is hard." Landing on, and staying on, Mars, or the moon, is a tremendous undertaking, and one well worthwhile.
The problem, as I see it, is that while we are wasting so much of our energy combatting phantoms, we may find it difficult to coordinate the necessary effort to succeed in such an endeavor.
So until "terror" stops being the driving force in American politics, I think any serious striving for "progress" will be put on the back burner.
And that is a terrifying though, isn't it?
they should but probly wont for another 10-20 years
I would like that. I would also really like to see flights to the Moon resume. Going to Mars is WAY harder than going to the Moon because it takes many months instead of only 3 days, so lunar flights will almost certainly resume before the first people go to Mars.
I'd love to go to Mars but I fear that politicians will talk a lot about it and then when it's time to appropriate money they'll force NASA to try to do it too cheaply and then things will naturally run into trouble and the usual cost overruns ...
Then they'll turn around and complain that things didn't work out the way they wanted them to and cancel the whole project after years of effort have gone into it.
People complain that spending dollars on space is wasteful. It isn't if you stick with your project to the end. What's really wasteful is doing things half way and then cancelling them.
That would be great and very rewarding. The faster it happens, the faster we will start living in the Real Future
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