It would have prestige, yes, but it wouldn’t one-up the USA, which is what I believe China ultimately want. I don’t think a “better” moon mission does either, though some kind of moon base is quite possible. I still think they’d shoot for Mars.
I don’t think they care all that much about cost. They aren’t a democracy, remember.
As for the more general theme of manned space missions: Assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out at some point, inevitably Earth will reach some kind of sustainable equilibrium. At this point I believe humanity would become…restless, and be quite willing to fund such things. It’s in our nature to explore, to be curious. That won’t go anywhere. This is most likely long after I’m dead however, sadly.
I’m sure a mission to Mars would benefit from future technology but then again we didn’t build 747s until we built the first gliders and biplanes. Someone had to build the first jet engine. I really don’t think we’re ever going to Mars if we wait until some random point in the future when we just know how to get to Mars.
I dunno, the cost of things seems pretty relative these days. A trillion here, a trillion there. I’m pretty sure the money is there, if a government or two or three want it to be.
Biosphere wasn’t a truly serious effort, and couldn’t really teach us that much about living on another planet. We learned a few lessons sure, but living in a greenhouse on earth is nothing like the moon or Mars.
One thing about Biosphere though, we need to pick scientists who get along better.
We already know (or at least we think we do) how to get to Mars. What we need - or need to wait for - is a closer approach between the cost & risk of doing so and the motivation.
Just so - you need to identify the things that might make those governments want to spend those trillions. Just now, a reason for doing so doesn’t seem apparent.
With care, it could be made similar. And it would surely be irresponsible to set off on the voyage without a very serious effort to examine the conditions expected on the way, and the ways in which people can successfully cope with these.
The astronauts and engineers of the Apollo program seemed to believe Mars would be next for a manned mission. Werner Von Braun suggested sending six ships so that they could come to each others assistance. Surely they had some plans to deal with radiation.
I’m all for the idea as space travel as means of ensuring the survival of humanity, but a trip to Mars within the next generation or two doesn’t really contribute to that goal. The technology that will get us to Mars has virtually nothing to do with the technology that may eventually get us to more useful parts of the universe. It would be like trying to move toward the technology necessary to sail across the Atlantic Ocean by perfecting the design of floating shoes: it’s a dead end.
I mean “more useful” in the sense of places we might want to physically send actual humans. Sending men to the far reaches of our own solar system doesn’t really get us anything that sending unmanned missions does not.
Actually, you have a point - until we develop a better propulsion method, interplanetary travel may not be the best thing to work on. Instead, NASA should be investing its efforts in cheaper, more efficient ways of getting humans into orbit. The fact that we’re still using the Space Shuttle after 30 years is an abomination; by all rights, we should have been 3 generations past it by now.
In other words, the government should figure out a way to make manned space travel profitable, and the private sector will take it from there.
Are you proposing we skip sending people to other planets in our solar system and get to work on sending people to other solar systems?
First, if we can’t send people to Mars we’re not going to develop the technology to send anyone further, and
How would going to another solar system be useful? Our solar system is probably pretty typical, so whatever useful there is, is already here. If anyone ever does go to another solar system, the only thing they’re sending back will be digitized information, but probably not much that is actually useful.
Well, strangeness is interesting, but not necessarily useful. A strange gas giant is a strange gas giant, but we’re not going to pack it up and ship it back home.
IIRC it took a round trip of a week for a moon mission.
With today’s technology, a mars round trip would take at least a year!
You wanna be cooped up in some sterile tin-can for a year?
MAYBE…if in the future we develop some kind of long-burn, high-thrust rocket engine based on nuclear fusion…AND some kind of force field that would protect astronauts from solar radiation and high speed micrometeorite strikes (deadly important with high velocities near the asteroid belt), we can make a round trip in one month.
But both technologies are still in the real of science fiction.
ETA: I wish that we WOULD go to Mars, but since we’ve been out of the game so long since Apollo, I don’t see us getting our crap together for Mars before the 2080s.
