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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.
His Interplanetary (Mars) Colonial Transport is so much more economical than the other proposed alternatives ($500,000 for a first ticket dropping to 140K later) that even if he's off by an order of magnitude it'll still be (much) cheaper.
Will he be able to pull it off? Frankly I have no idea but if you had asked me 10 years ago if he could get a 10 story booster to fly back to its launch pad and land, or build an electric car company worth more than GM or become one of the biggest solar providers in the U.S. I wouldn't have stopped laughing.
Give him a chance, it's almost assuredly better than you or I or certainly those idiots in Washington (maybe not the scientists but certainly their politician masters) could do
What a waste of a good space station. Attach boosters to it and send it to congress.
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.
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