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Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA
FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a 'rehash of what we did 40 years ago' which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."
Not just NASA and space programs. A good chunk of our entire worlds resources should be devoted to getting us off this rock.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
Instead we bicker over who owns what dirt and what invisible superbeing is watching us try to die with more stuff than everyone else.........
Maybe its not such a bad idea to wipe us out. We're insane.
I have a couple of articles that I might suggest you read:
Neil Tyson on exploring space
10 Everyday Gadgets With Ties To The Space Program
And actually, I could continue copying links for a long time. This is just barely scraping the surface. The space program has paid for itself many times over (one conservative estimate is 3 times) with advances to technology and industry.