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Re: Why colonize the Moon before going to Mars?
Why go to ether? Until space flight is orders of magnitude cheaper, or space budgets orders of magnitude greater there is no hope of more than token visits to Mars. Worse there are unsolved, and possibly unsolvable problems for a mars expedition. Can we shield passengers from radiation? Can we protect them from bone loss?
The mars rovers are doing an excellent job. If we wish we can send an awful lot of them to mars for the price of one manned mission. Science would be better served. We just don't know where (if anywhere) on mars that a breakthrough in understanding may occur. A single, or even a handful of manned missions may just land in uninteresting places. If ever there is a reason to send men to mars it will be AFTER a very special location is found.
Anyway, this is all a political fantasy which will fade fast enough now that Bush is re-elected. If not it will fade VERY fast when the next president is elected and finds that the major budget allocations needed start in his presidency!
Am I the only one who sees that Bush is setting up NASA for scrapping in the next presidency? Bush has not allocated enough cash for the preparation towards mars to progress without major cuts elsewhere in the space program. If after that the mars program is shelved there will be very little left. NASA will be left to justify the money spent in terms of the remaining cash strapped projects. It will be easy to argue that NASA is poor value for money and that it should be wound up. Any accountant could put a good case for transferring the remaining projects to private companies.
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