Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars

techmaven writes: "In an exclusive, two-part article, Special Report: Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars and Buzz Aldrin's Mars Vision: There and Back Again, the legendary astronaut, whose footprints still dot the windless surface of the moon, describes his vision of the next step in space exploration. Cruise ships to Mars, but not with shuffleboard or bad lounge entertainers ..."

Comments

Speculation About Cyclers, Nukes, Probes and Geeks

[Spamalamadingdong]

My question is, why is this meme back in the public consciousness NOW?

Maybe it's because the 33rd anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up? Or maybe that's how long it takes to get the news media to pay attention to an idea about space. Or maybe a reporter thought this was a gosh-wow neat idea because he'd never heard of it before (because he never bothered studying space, as most reporters don't) so he thought it would make a good article for his equally-ignorant readership. Whatever it is, it's pathetic.

Second question, where did the sudden push for NASA nukes come from?

The Bush administration is pro-nuke in general. It makes a certain amount of sense to push them for space, where the energy/mass ratio is so much more important than for anything on terra firma.

And my third question, why is space so passe to Slashdotters and by extension tech oriented fans in general?

First man in space was over 40 years ago. The last manned moon landing was over 30 years ago. To the average geek, the World Wide Web is now and s/he can have a lot of fun (and get a job) getting hands dirty hacking with the code. Space stuff is before they were born, making it pre-history, their parents' generation's stuff; it's passé. It's also locked up behind requirements of graduate school and other barriers which keep them from having a chance to play with it, so they migrate to the things which are accessible.

Hey, it's speculation, whaddaya want?