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Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap To Mars, To Send People There by the 2030s (cnn.com)
The United States President Barack Obama said Tuesday the country will send Americans to Mars by the 2030s and return them "safely to Earth." This is all part of a longer-term goal of making it possible to "one day remain there for an extended time," he added in an op-ed published on CNN. The effort will require cooperation between public and private space interests in meeting that goal, the president added. As a sign of forward progress, private space companies will send astronauts to the International Space Station within the next two years. "Someday, I hope to hoist my own grandchildren onto my shoulders. We'll still look to the stars in wonder, as humans have since the beginning of time," Obama wrote. "But instead of eagerly awaiting the return of our intrepid explorers, we'll know that because of the choices we make now, they've gone to space not just to visit, but to stay -- and in doing so, to make our lives better here on Earth." The White House in a joint blog post with NASA said that seven companies have received awards to develop habitation systems. And this fall, NASA will provide companies with the opportunity to add modules and other capabilities to the International Space Station.
Every outgoing presimadent since the Reagan, blessings upon him, makes the same grandiose claims that we'll put a Man on Mars real soon now.
Just like Lucy tricking Charlie Brown into thinking she's not going to yank the football away this time.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The Apollo program was not entirely symbolic, it was in large part an effort to develop rockets powerful enough to plant a nuclear weapon anywhere on Earth. This is also why budgets fell out after ICBMs were complete.
What is it about presidents at the end of their second terms that they love to float space goals?
Bush, near the end of his 2nd term:
""Our third goal," Bush said, "is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond." He proposed sending robotic probes to the lunar surface by 2008, with a human mission as early as 2015, "with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time." "
While I'd love it ever to be true, I can't imagine any post Obama congress will fund it at all.
-Styopa
Mars is a dull spot to colonize- wouldn't get much. The moon is really only useful for rocket launches and observatories. The best spots in the solar system to colonize are Mercury (heavy metals), the Jovian satellites (liquid water, loads of raw material) and the Saturnian moons (same story). These are also the ones being ignored.
No purpose to it?
People go to Death Valley, Philadelphia, church, and climb Mt. Everest.
No purpose is required, just curiosity.
Colonizing Venus with floating cities is a far more sexier venture.
...or at least send a solar powered robotic drone into the atmosphere. The winds can get a little rough (over 200 kph) but we would have a freakin' plane flying around through the clouds of another world.
Before sending people to Mars we should send a practice mission to the moon for 2 years. If you can't send people to the moon and have them survive on their own for 2 years, you certainly can't send them to Mars.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Mars in 2030s? Dream on! We'll have defaulted by then. NASA won't have funds to even stare at Mars.
We should establish a permanent presense on the Moon first. Maybe even build industrial infrastructure there, use it as a staging area for a future manned Mars mission. Honestly, how much easier would it be to launch from the Moon? Also, if we can't work out the kinks of living on the Moon, then how can we reasonably expect to live on Mars for extended periods of time? The Moon is the perfect Proving Grounds for this sort of endeavor, and it's literally right in our backyard. Seems like a no-brainer to me to take advantage of it. Also, in future decades, why couldn't any number of industries or research facilities build their facilities and do their work there? There's no environment to pollute, no ecosystem to destroy, you could do any number of things that are expensive or even prohibited on Earth without harming anything.
Before sending people to Mars we should send a practice mission to the moon for 2 years.
From what I read elsewhere, one of the Martian moons would become a way station for the initial flyby and landing missions.
Other than "it's there" and "Nobody else has gone" what's the point?
I seriously don't think it's worth the trouble to go to Mars, just to go. However, I support the effort because it will advance technology and likely lead to gains in scientific knowledge should we actually get there (which I don't think is likely).
What's sad here is that this is *obviously* Obama searching for a legacy, not a full hearted attempt to actually do this. Had this been important, why didn't he do it 8 years ago when his party had both cambers? Oh, no, wasn't important then. He has 180 days left with Obama Care is as popular as getting a root canal, it's over for him. Now he has a Congress that won't give him the time of day even if he asked nicely and literally zero power (legally and politically) to get this funded this so he's been reduced to plagiarizing JFK and banging on the bully pulpit trying to get attention in the middle of a election that is a whole circus of side shows. He's spitting into the wind.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No one's going to Mars, coming back or not.
Really? You can tell the future? If you want to say you think no one is going to Mars in the time frame specified I probably would agree with you. I think pulling it off by the 2030s without a crash government program seems improbable given the technological, economic, and political realities of the day. If you are claiming no one will go to Mars ever I think that stands a very high probability of being a false statement.
There is simply no purpose to it.
Entirely false. There absolutely is a purpose to it. More than one in fact. You may not like or appreciate the reasons for trying to get to Mars but they are real and meaningful. Here's just a few of them. Scientific exploration, technology development, national pride, joy of exploration, curiosity, preserving our species, financial gain, biotechnology, and the list goes on and on and on. It's an expensive and difficult task and it will probably take decades if not centuries to actually pull off but to claim there is no purpose or value to it is just idiotic.
Apollo was the Mother Of All Demos, and it was a big stunt.
Yes it was. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing or that something like it won't be worth doing ever again. Furthermore the cost of getting to space has fallen substantially since then and we are a lot better at it now. Every indicator points towards cost to orbit continuing to fall. Once it gets cheap enough to get to space I would argue that a manned mission to Mars will become almost an inevitability. First for exploration and then for other purposes.
Are you serious? They're basically where the Soviets and US were in the early 1960s.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Lame duck or not. If Obama were on the rocket to Mars, Trump would get the Martians to pay for it.
$7 to $8 dollars in goods and services produced, for every $1 of government money spent. Acceleration of computer, miniaturization of computer parts, which benefited mankind. Software development Freeze dried foods Countless others. Before you go on with your anti-capitalist socialist agenda, you might want to look this up. It will help you from looking like a FOOL.
The Apollo program was not entirely symbolic, it was in large part an effort to develop rockets powerful enough to plant a nuclear weapon anywhere on Earth. This is also why budgets fell out after ICBMs were complete.
Well, that was pretty much accomplished in 1957 by Sergei Korolev with the R-7 rocket that put Sputnik in orbit, and von Braun a few months later with the Juno 1. The Minuteman 1 (n.b. a solid fuel rocket) went into service in 1962, and from that point forward there wasn't really a lot of overlap between the US space and ballistic missile program. The situation was different in the Soviet Union, whose space program was really much more a step-child of the weapons programs. Soviet designers were just as capable as America (and America's Germans), but they could only dream of the kind of funding Apollo got.
Anyhow the whole argument about "symbolic" vs "practical" is naive. Something as massive a the Apollo program doesn't happen for "a" reason. It is necessarily the confluence of many different interests and purposes. One of them was clearly "symbolic", although that does *not* mean it wasn't practical. At its peak Apollo approached almost 1% of US GDP, and the politicians who approved it were not all interested in space at all. They had very practical, Earth-bound reasons to value the symbolic power of a US Moon landing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...and by "ripped it apart" you really mean Congress "failed to throw boatloads of more taxpayer cash at it to keep it afloat". It did pass without a SINGLE Republican vote so there was no need to concede anything to them. Obamacare is exactly what Democrats wanted and they own it entirely. Some wanted even an more radical version (e.g. Single Payer), but they could get enough support from their own side to go an inch further.