Mars Race Heats up Further

anzha writes "It seems what was once the province of the superpowers is no longer so. ESA and the Japanese attempted their own Mars orbiters (successfully and not, respectively). The Brits fired off Beagle 2 and are talking of going for Beagle 3. Now the Canadians are talking about a probe for Mars in 2011. How long before we see the Japanese and Russians try again? Might India or China take a stab at it as well?"

Comments

Re:Ugh, not a good thing

[bluGill]

You obviously fail to realize just how large the earth is. 1/2 the size of the earth is still a lot of land. Come to think of it, 2/3s of the earth is covered by water, so if you restrict landers to only land, there is more room on Mars. (assuming we accept your numbers, I don't feel like checking them and they sound right).

Space junk is a problem in orbit because it is moving very fast. Space junk on Mars is not moving. Everybody will avoid the functioning rovers, because there is a lot of area to cover so it is best to cover something far away. You wouldn't make claims about the goegraphy of the earth based on only samples from your backyard, and you don't make claims about Mars from samples from one area, you try to cover them all.

Hopefully it doesn't turn into a collaboration

[follower_of_christ]

I would love to see the ESA, China, Japan, India, England, or whoever else provide the US with more of the same competition. I believe it will poke at the pride that the US public and motivate us to work harder and be more ethical. Without ethics/integrity a society stagnates (As we are seeing today). With competition like this the US public has a reason to rally and refine itself to attempt to be the best. WIthout this competition we stagnate.

I applaud the rest of the world for becoming competitors in the space rafe and giving the US a new determination.

Just what we need

[kippy]

I keep hearing people saying that a new space race won't start because the cold war is over.

What this is shaping up to be is a land grab which should be healthy for Mars exploration. Here's hoping. There's a lot of land up there to grab. Now let's get those crazy space treaties rewritten by some people who aren't "citizen of the world" hippies.

Why Not the UNSA?

[DynaSoar]

I think all space programs should be collected under the United Nations as the United Nations Space Agency. The ESA serves as an example. Cooperation would accomplish more for more people than competition.

Oh sure, there'd be lots of collisions between agendas and between individuals. That's to be expected. But when it happens those responsible should me marked for replacement rather than placation. It's time we grew out of that sort of nonsense and space exploration is the perfect venue for that.

If the US and the USSR can come together in the Apollo-Soyuz project, surely today's more enlightened countries can set aside differences much less than mutually assured nuclear destruction.

The major problem would be the same problem NASA has: professional administrators and politicians. When engineers ran things we got to the moon. When managers ran things we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April?" and no more Challenger.

Space exploration should be the right, responsibility and heritage of all humanity, not just those who can pry enough GNP away to put together their own team. This is not sports, this is science, and if done right, a chance to evolve socially as a planet.

Re:Why Not the UNSA?

[kippy]

Ths ISS is a scandal partly because it was built by a committee, not a group focused on one clear definable goal ("let's build a space station" doesn't count). The last thing humanity needs is to unite and therefore bind at the feet, the world's space agencies.

Almost everything great done in space was the result of competition. We need more of that, not less. If no one feels any pressure to work toward a goal harder, you will have engineers and administrators world-wide leaning on their shovels for decades to come as they we continue to be bound in low Earth orbit.

How About The US?

[TheFlyingGoat]

While it's great that these other countries are providing some type of competition for the US, we have a pretty big edge for Mars right now. Only a handful of other countries have been able to get in orbit around Mars so far (Russia and the EU?), and isn't the US the only one to get a working rover on the surface (3, in fact?). Now that we have a proven method for getting rovers to the surface, I don't doubt that we'll be sending quite a few more in the near future. We'll have the most survey information about the surface, the most scientific data, the most proven methods, and are the only country that has successfully put a man on another celestial object... that sure would give us a head start for a manned mission.

Good luck to the rest of you countries... I hope you catch up to make it more interesting. :)