The infrastructure for such a mission is not going to be available for at least 50 years. The will to go may never be available. The funding does not exist, the recent financial collapse just ‘disappeared’ almost half the wealth on this planet, 45% of the money went bye bye, because it was never really there at all.
40 years before someone walks on the moon again, I will bet on that. 100 years before some equivalant of the International Space Station exists on the surface for the moon.
My thoughts exactly. NASA’s glory days are long gone; Challenger in '86 and Columbia in '03 has shaken the public’s faith. I can’t see a scenario in which Congress or a President can successfully allocate the money to R&D for a Martian mission. There are way too many social issues that need to be addressed. And as others have noted, we’re not fighting a cold war anymore. al Qaeda isn’t going to buckle because we put someone on Mars.
I don’t know about y’all, but there is something a little… overreaching, I suppose, IMO about a manned mission to Mars. The moon is “ours” so it’s fine for us to venture there, leave some junk up there, etc. I know we’ve crashed probes into Mercury, Venus, and Mars before as well. But I’m not convinced we should be there. What if human interference, no matter how slight, has a catastrophic effect on any life forms that might exist there? I sure as hell don’t want Martians popping over for a visit!
I also think that a Martian mission would be something the Chinese would do. Or an international space collective. Or perhaps even private investors (like if Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and that Russian dude that owns Manchester United got together and started their own space company)…
Another factor arguing against a manned mission to Mars is the demonstrated (and increasing) effectiveness of unmanned missions at a tiny fraction of the cost. It is already the case that a manned mission necessarily requires the sacrifice of vast amounts of science (that could be done with the same money). There’s every reason to believe that this problem will be greater in future.
Can we muster the collective will to massively retard the progress of planetary science in return for an obvious PR stunt? Not impossible, but I suspect unlikely.
I can distinctly remember in the 1990s reading a major news story about a manned visit to Mars scheduled for some time in the 2020s. Wikipedia’s article on a Manned Mission to Mars now says that it could possibly happen in the late 2020s, early 30s. These sorts of timeframes tend to get pushed back, not brought forward.
I agree with those who are not over-enthusiastic, but do you really think we would fly there once and never again? Do you think think we will never return to the moon?
I think that we’ll likely return to the Moon, as part of the run-up to the Mars mission. We’ll go back, and hop around on TV, and maybe we’ll play badminton this time. Then they’ll send the Mars mission off, and people will forget about the Moon, just like last time.
There really is only one compelling reason to send people to Mars, and that reason is to be the first people on Mars. Nobody is going to spend a zillion dollars and a year out in space just to be the second crew on Mars.
With China getting more aggressive with their space program don’t you think that will eventually push NASA and PR to give NASA more funding to do such a thing?
All the members of Apollo 11 were just under 40, and 8 of 12 men to walk on the Moon’s surface were under 40, so such precedent as there is would support the idea that they’ll be 35-40.
We will colonize the solar system and later the galaxy or we will go extinct. Simple as that. Those who say it’s just not going to happen aren’t following through with their thought experiments. The first person to walk on Mars is probably already alive.
I want humans to be living off the planet as much as anyone. I want a Moon colony and a Mars colony. I think it’s important to have humans in space ‘because it’s there’.
But I’ve read enough of Stranger On A Train’s posts to know his analyses are much more realistic than my wishes. I’ve heard that reruns of I Love Lucy were preempted by later Moon missions, and that people complained to the networks. (I may have read it in Lost Moon, but I don’t remember.) During the Moon missions some people complained that the money being spent would be spent more wisely toward solving problems on Earth. Stranger has pointed out elsewhere that robots can accomplish the needed science much more cheaply (and safely, obviously) than humans. While, as I said, I want humans in space and in my opinion robots are not especially suited to serendipitous discoveries, I have to generally agree with Stranger.
Once upon a time people were more accepting of losses. Look at the names of streets at Edwards AFB and see how many were named after dead test pilots. (The base itself was renamed in honour of one.) But even then, the Apollo program was under severe scrutiny after the fire and the deaths of three astronauts. After Challenger exploded the Shuttle didn’t fly for over two years. Though public support remained strong, the program was again suspended after the Challenger disaster. For a long time it seemed people expected zero losses. Maybe the deaths of over a dozen astronauts have reminded the public of the perils of space flight. Or maybe not.
In any case, I never hear anyone IRL talking about the Shuttle, the ISS, or anything else space-related. What I hear people talking about is jobs, the economy, the wars… Earthbound things. We might have the will to send crews into harm’s way to walk on another planet; but I don’t think most people in the U.S. want to spend the money on it.
EDIT: And… I spent so much time composing and typing that I was beaten to my first point.
Ha! See what happens when you waste time crafting thoughtful, well-considered replies? You get your argument’s rhetorical force blunted by a fast-typing idiot! That’ll learn you.
Now imagine if it had cost you seven hundred million dollars to make that post! And THAT’S why we won’t see multiple missions to Mars!
As a species, we will not last anywhere remotely near a billion years anyway. No species has. In fact, arguably space exploration will hasten the extinction of the human race, not least because the human body is so miserably suited to space travel. If we wish to explore the galaxy, we will likely need to alter ourselves substantially to do so. Our progeny might well one day travel to other stars, but they will no longer be biologically human.
No species has built super-colliders, either. But you’re right, in a way, that a billion years from now, we will have evolved substantially. Though we will be the direct and conscious descendents of “us,” therefore conversationally indistinguishable from “us.”
And space travel will not kill us off faster than the hazards of putting all our eggs in one basket (staying on Earth alone) will. Especially not with advancements in cryobiology and biosphere space travel (far more likely the latter, I think.) We’ll leap frog out into space over hundreds or thousands of years, not fire off a hail-Mary like the Kryptonians did.
While this might hold true for our lifetimes, it’s short-sighted in the long run. It’s like saying that 15th century Europeans would never cross the Atlantic because 12th century Europeans didn’t want to.
Colonizing the galaxy? Even at the speed of light (or actually just under that, since humans wouldn’t survive the experience), the time it would take to get just to the nearest star is unimaginable. It’s a pipe dream, and it won’t happen. Hell, humans will never reach the outer limits of our solar system simply because there is no reason to do so: human life is unsustainable out there. This species will meet its end, either by destroying our home planet’s capability to tolerate us, or by cataclysm. It’s a tossup as to which comes first, but it’s only a matter of time.