I took a tour of Kennedy Space Center in 2005, shortly after Bush announced his plan for a manned mission to Mars. The tour guide was telling all of the kids that one of THEM could be the first person to set foot on Mars! Around 2025! It’s in the works! The guy was so good that I felt like a kid again.
I’m all for limited government, but this is a worthy goal. Why? Because it’s there.
A country that hasn’t put anyone on the moon is going to beat everyone at going to Mars… :dubious:
It took 8 years for U.S. to go to Moon. I made a prediction for 140 years hence.
Keep these oh-so insightful rejoinders coming. 
I don’t really think the space race (considering Americans and Russians have already beat them) isn’t one China has a winning horse in. Last I heard, they plan to have someone on the moon in 2030.
It’s just my opinion. The Chinese are a great people who are very intelligent. I just don’t think they will be the first on Mars due to their history of space travel, or lack of it.
It’s bad enough that politicians talk about spending money on sending people to Mars - what’s worst is when people confuse that with science. I would LOVE to see much more spent on unmanned space missions throughout the solar system and on unmanned space observatories of all kinds.
For my tax dollar, you can’t beat giant Newtonians floating around our Lagrange points!
With the advanced robotics we have today, a manned trip makes no sense. Sure, it would be nice to have geologists and biologists exploring Mars, but the costs and risks are too high. In order to ensure a safe return trip, we would have to have several backup systems…and that would triple the costs.
Maybe when we develop nuclear rocket engines, it could be feasible-but not now.
Would the Chinese blow $150 billion on this? Doubtful…we in the USA cannot (we are spending our money MUCH more wisely (funding wars in Libya, Afghanistan, etc., that will have a REAL payback!)
I would much rather they spend the money on space telescopes.
And that brings the discussion to a salient point; the advocates for a manned mission to Mars (or the Moon, or other bodies) are almost exclusively politicians and space enthusiasts, not scientists of technologists interested in near-term space resource exploitation. There may be other reasons for manned exploration besides science and raw material exploitation, but there is not a strong case for profit in either dollars or basic knowledge from human exploration, and the costs of maintaining people in space are close to two orders of magnitude higher than robotic missions, for what at best is a marginal increase in mission capability (and given the limitations of human endurance and function in extraterrestrial environments, probably less). Our yield of scientific knowledge from unmanned exploration is pennies compared to even a trivial manned mission that produces little unique or novel science. A good illustration for this is to perform a literature search on scientific papers involving STS or ISS missions, and the compare it to that from the Voyager program or the Mars Exploration Rovers; the unmanned missions exceed science yield by many orders of magnitude.
That isn’t to say that human exploration should not be considered. But with current limitation on propulsion methods, our limited knowledge of hazard and vulnerability for long-term human habitation and transit in interplanetary space, and restrictions in available budget and resources for space exploration overall, it makes far more sense to pursue unmanned exploration and exploitation methods over spending the majority of budget and effort of a mission trying to keep proteinaceous bags of water alive and healthy against the hazards of vacuum and radiation.
Stranger
Well, I’m pretty sure astronauts on the moon dug up a lot more dirt and rocks and brought more of it back to Earth than any robotic Mars explorer has Mars dirt, and in a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of time. That doesn’t include transit time, either.
I really don’t think you can compare what a live, educated science-astronaut can do on site to what a robot can do.
The prefect scenario is humans and robots augmenting each other, each doing what they do best. Certainly there will have to be more unmanned missions to Mars before a human one.
At this point I don’t think very many people are going to care if we send more rovers to Mars. There doesn’t seem to be all that much to learn that way.
Profit or not, there are a lot of people who want to see a man on Mars, and be the first. The company that does it is probably going to recoup the cost of it, in increased business and celebrity.
As for space profits in general, I don’t see a large segment of humanity living on Mars. Why? The money is going to be much closer to home, in Earth’s orbit & on the Moon. Business already makes billions in orbit, and it really looks like travel to and from orbit is going to get cheaper and more routine.
Sure I can. “Doing exploratory science,” isn’t about the amount of samples collected or taking videos bouncing around in low gravity; it is about defining the areas of missing or incomplete knowledge and collecting observations and data that allow you to fill in and refine those areas. I’ve seen the claims about the versatility of a person versus that of a robot; unfortunately these usually compare the abilities of a human in a shirt-sleeve environment, not one encased in a restrictive pressure suit and subject to exhaustion and disorientation in a non-terrestrial field. It is readily demonstrable that a larger volume and more extensive work of scientific discovery has resulted from robotic exploration than manned missions to the Moon and Low Earth Orbit simply by looking at the literature, even if you level the playing field by limiting the evaluation to work done within the orbit of the Moon.
Recoup the cost of such an effort how, exactly? Even optimistic estimates of the cost of a manned Mars mission are in the several tens of billions of dollars; Moore than could conceivably be recouped on any entertainment and educational products, or via associated business opportunities.
Despite the promotional literature and bombastic statements of certain space entrepreneurs, it is unclear that transportation to orbit using chemically-powered rockets is going to become dramatically cheaper than current costs by established and relatively mature systems, and anything but routine in the sense of daily orbital launches or access to space tourism within reach to even the moderately affluent, much less the average person. The “billions [made] in orbit,” are almost exclusively telecommunications, not launch services itself, which is at best a marginal business with high fixed costs and exposure to repeated risk of catastrophic failure.
Stranger
You and me both. We should have an operational base on the Moon today.
To do what?
Stranger
To do… y’know? Moon stuff.
Well, I was too young to remember the first moon landing, but the astronauts had to do something while they were there. The main point was proving we could get there, and we did. Did a robot land on the moon first? I don’t know. I bet most people don’t, nor care. What was its name again? Beats me.
I don’t know if the first person on Mars is just going to touch down, say “tag,” slam a conspiracy-proof flag in the ground and come right back, or if some sort of semi long-term base will be set up. If a manned base is set up then, again, astronauts have to do something while they’re there. A base would necessitate that shirt-sleeve environment, right? Even suiting up and driving around in a rover of some kind for a couple hours would cover decades of robot ground so far. I’m pretty sure a live astronaut could refine areas of missing or incomplete knowledge much faster than it’s taking robots.
I don’t know yet what the point of going to Mars will be. Like I said, there probably isn’t anything exciting to learn, and almost certainly nothing profitable to learn. I’m leaning towards a “prove-we-can-do-it” mission and there’s no point arguing for a robot to prove humans can get to Mars.
Really? I thought companies like SpaceX were already looking at some juicy government contracts, at least. I don’t know how big they are in satellite launch, but I thought they were in there, bringing launch costs down. I don’t see a market for going to Mars regularly much in the next century (ever?), but the company that proves it can do that sort of thing ought to enjoy a pretty lucrative share of the space market, whatever it turns out to be.
And yet, the business of launching satellites is booming. It’s not as if we’re headed towards some “peak oil” problem with chemical rockets.
I used to have high hopes for computers and robots, but I guess I’m disappointed. Computers are still dumb-as-rocks. Eventually it’s going to be cheaper to send up humans to flip burgers or at least tend the protein vats or something, than robots.
I’m all for sending out lots of robotic cameras to take cool pictures of solar system, and extra-solar system stuff though. It seems our best chance of finding out whatever dark matter and energy are, is right here on earth in big shiny colliders. When it comes to things off-planet, it’s more about doing things, than learning things. Isn’t humans doing things what it’s really all about?
Up to a point. But it depends on how much it’s going to cost.
I’m gonna take a wild-ass guess and say a manned Mars mission can’t be done for under a trillion dollars. Is it worth a trillion dollars to put a man on Mars? Not to me, it isn’t. If you could do it for $50 billion, first I’d laugh in your face because it can’t be done, but if it could, I’d be all for it.
My general take is that it makes sense to do stuff like this when our technology has advanced to the point where it just isn’t that big a stretch anymore. Columbus’ voyages to America are a perfect example. Maybe by 2050 we will have mastered the technology of space elevators, which would dramatically reduce the cost of getting out of our local gravity well, and thereby reduce the costs of getting to anywhere in space, from low Earth orbit on up. Or maybe we’ll achieve a breakthrough in maintaining a closed habitat over a period of years. Or maybe we’ll develop propulsion systems that will put the ones we currently have to shame.
But even if we really, really want to see a human being set foot on Mars, it makes sense to wait until Mars is more within our reach than it is now. It’s not like Mars won’t be there 50 or 100 years down the road.
I’d personally like to see an unmanned probe pick up a few rocks and come back. Although I suspect that if there were money in the budget for it (and assuming it could overcome the technological hurdles), it would already be on the drawing boards.
A man on Mars for a trillion? Nah, I don’t think I’d vote for that either, and I don’t think we’ll see a private company doing that. For a trillion I want an almost self-sufficient base with greenery and babies being born. 
Going with a transportation analogy, I’d say we wouldn’t have airplanes or anything close to resembling modern commercial air travel if we’d waited until things got easy. Dangerous, rickety airplanes had to come first, and I’m sure there were plenty of poo-pooers who’d have bet we’d never, ever see over one billion passengers flying around the world per year. Here we are! Modern aircraft aren’t “easy” either. They’re ridiculously complicated compared to what we used to get by with, and I’d guess quite a bit more expensive, even in adjusted dollars. The price of a single ticket isn’t completely out of this world for many people nowadays.
True, it’ll be there.
Can we stick with the level of relative ease implied by my Columbus example? It wasn’t ‘easy’ for him to cross the ocean, but the technology was there such that others could replicate that trip fairly quickly once they saw it was doable.
See Columbus. Several different teams were working on heavier-than-air flight at the same time as the Wrights. Samuel Langley’s plane’s airworthiness has been demonstrated; a few days before the Wright Brothers’ initial flight, only some tangle at launch kept it from getting airborne. If the Wrights hadn’t flown, someone else would have, quite possibly the very next year. Heavier-than-air flight was ‘easier’ relative to the level of knowledge and technology of 1903 than Columbus’ journey was for 1492.
Langley’s plane was not capable of flight. The real tangle at launch was the plane falling into the Potomac river after it was catapulted off the deck of a boat. It didn’t produce enough lift to stay aloft after the added momentum of the catapult was lost, all while the boat was driven into a headwind as fast as possible. Had it flown, it had no controls, and would have crashed on landing. The Wright Bros. great record is “The world’s first power-driven heavier-than-air machine in which man made free, controlled, and sustained flight”. Whether or not a brick with an engine on it managed to seperate from the ground at some earlier time is irrelevant.
I mention this because in a sense we are at the brick with a rocket engine on it point of space travel. We have no idea how to land a manned craft that can take off again on the surface of Mars. The ISS is in near earth orbit, is regularly resupplied, and still a potential deathtrap. A multi-year mission Mars is more likely to end in disaster than success right now without an unlikely expenditure of resources, IMHO.
Perhaps most of us who had reached the later stages of childhood on the day of the first moon landing shared a common inspiration from it. Some of us grew up to become engineers and scientists, while others merely eagerly awaited the next National Geographic with a space-centric cover story (raising hand). And now a lot of that hope has been squelched by depressing conditions in the world generally.
But even worse than that is the fact that technologically we seem to have hit a firewall in terms of keeping the astronauts alive and healthy in interplanetary space for as long as it would take to get to Mars. It’s a little disconcerting to hear most experts today saying it simply can’t be done.