Buzz Aldrin To NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP To Reach Mars (space.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said. "We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost." Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space or other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said. Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" -- spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.

Comments

Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[m.alessandrini]

I think that, yes, in a few decades it could be theoretically possible, given the proper money, to send some people there and back. But then it's so far, so expensive and so uninhabitable, that I'm afraid it will remain a proof of concept, and Mars will be forgot for the following century, much like going to the moon.

Maybe it would be better to start sending material and structures, and only then sending actual people. It's sad in my mind, but maybe we should give up seeing men on Mars in our lifetime, if we want it to be something more than a passing experiment.

Private only? Really?

[getuid()]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...

Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.

Re:Private only? Really?

[angel'o'sphere]

Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it.
That is completely wrong.

Historically nearly all infrastructure in Europe was state owned (Railways, Telephon, Roads, Water distribution, Gas distribution, Electric Grids, Post/Mail, Power Plants etc.)

Since the mid 1990s most European countries started to privatize parts of the infrastructure. Some countries with success, some failed misserable in certain areas, e.g. the British railway system.

E.g. the French Power Company is still 85% state owned.

Re:Should we allow ourselves off-world?

[Baron_Yam]

>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?

Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.

Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.

Re:OR -

[silentcoder]

None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.

It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us.
The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.

That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.