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Originally Posted by BlameTheEx
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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In the end run there are things that humans can do better than any robot. Eventually, which is something a lot of people tend to overlook, we will have to spread out across space if the human race plans to continue to survive. With all the debate going on about biology related issues in this forum one might consider what is the effect over time of any population that remains on one island to hardship? The reason I mention this is this planet is an island and untill we learn to fully leave this island we are subject to those same problems ourselves. The time to learn how to leave that island is now, not some far off time in the future. New Resouces would be one reason in and of itself to move outward. Population dispersion onto large areas would be another. Along with that I might add biodiversity as another reason in the end run. Simply put not keeping all our eggs in the same basket tends to increase the long term odds of survival of the species.
Yes, cost needs to be lowered. I know personally you will get no argument on that out of any of the guys at NASA even. Everyone recognizes that. But some of the cost issues arises out of supply and demand. The smaller the supply and demand generally with spacecraft and with propulsion the higher the cost. There's even examples of such in the auto industry where certain luxery cars tend to cost a whole lot more simply because not as many are demanded. There is also a certain amount of politics that keeps the cost of space exploration high. Its not as cut and dry as some like to picture it.
One other reason actually goes back to politics. We got into space in a race with communism. At the current times China has set its sights on going to the moon. I believe that China at present is a communist nation still. They still tend to have military goals in mind in most that they do. Would one care to wake up in the near future and find say America with no presence on the Moon or elsewhere and China way ahead and in control of such. That is about the situation we may face if America does not move forward. The only real human presence we have at this time is with the ISS and that sits in too low of an orbit to serve as a decent space launch platform.
Robots are good. But they are only good up to a point. There have been experiments conducted here on earth where humans will spot signs of life long before any robot can. It takes both to make a decent space program and it takes the human presence to learn to move off of this island we call earth.
