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NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program
cmansley writes "NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"
The proposal of a one-way tripe has been around for a long time. From what I have read, most, if not all people in the field that are qualified, would be willing to volunteer to go. And why not? You would be one of the first people to set foot on an alien world. You would be history. Movies would be made of your life. Ego aside, the experience would be amazing. You'd see things no other human ever has and discover things that could possible change the way humanity looks at itself. This would be one of the most epic journeys mankind has undertaken. Many qualified sane people would willingly volunteer to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Let's be honest here: Put in the context of the bailout, or even of the military budget or social programs like Social Security or Medicare, everything we could possible do in space looks like a bargain. The issue has always been political will.
Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
So, when we decide we want to cut money from the budget, NASA and other programs like it are the first on the chopping block. We cut a billion here and a billion there from various programs, but won't touch the programs that take the largest bite out of the federal budget: the military, social security, and medicare. We could fully fund a mission to Mars right now just by cutting out a small portion of the money the military wastes on various projects it doesn't need or even particularly want, but that's never going to happen because to the average voter failing to fund whatever Congress thinks the military wants is anti-American and will cause the terrorists to win.
Our government has consistently shown that the way to win elections is to increase military spending and cut education and science research, including space exploration. This should tell you where our priorities are as a society, and why we're unlikely to make it to Mars or anywhere else in our lifetime.
First, the obvious conclusion of your argument is that we should never send anything into space because we will always be able to overtake it 20 years later.
Second, you ignore the benefits of the first 20 years of using the thing (i.e., knowing things 20 years earlier than we otherwise would have).
Third, building the initial improves our ability to build a successor. Without building one now, the one we build 20 years from now might be ten years behind where it otherwise could have been. We might as well not build anything we can send into space until we've got FTL travel down cold.
Irony
Definition: Someone bashing DARPA on the internet, a global network that grew out of the ARPANET project funded by DARPA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET