While they were expensive, each expedition set out with the hope they’d be profitable. They weren’t purely exploration missions.
The Spanish, in particular, were pretty blatantly obvious about looking for gold, silver, and anything else of value (including El Dorado and any potential fountains of youth).
Likewise, the British colonies were funded in the hope of profit. They were funded by companies (not the government) in the hope new colonies would produce sufficient funds to pay for themselves within a few years. To further this goal, much of the initial agriculture was not for food but stuff to sell. Certainly they were expensive risks but hardly luxuries.
ETA: Note the original Jamestown and nearby colonies were soon into the tobacco business. And even Plymouth was originally funded with the intent they’d send back stuff to trade. Some of the colonists themselves had different ideas but the financial backers had expectations they’d get something back on their investment.
Although there are certainly problems with the NASA safety culture, this statement completely misrepresents them and the reasons for performing Accident Investigation Review Boards (IRB). The problem with the NASA safety culture isn’t just that it is risk adverse, especially when it comes to manned missions, but that it is what I call “risk obtuse”; that is, when presented with evidence of a potential new failure mode, such as partial burnthrough of the SRB o-rings, the potenial for fire in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the originally Apollo Command Module, or frozen debris impacting upon the Shuttle Orbiter reinforced carbon-carbon thermal protections system, the response is to look for rationales why this is acceptable rather than recognizing that an inherent design flaw has been uncovered which needs to be addressed. This basic problem is hardly limited to NASA–the same is true in many fields from automotive and aerospace to pharmaceutical and civil architecture–but it is particularly entrenched in NASA because of the budget- and schedule-limited scenarios with novel and complex technoligy which the agency has been routinely tasked. Having to redesign a major system subjects the agency to stern rebuke by both its critics and supporters, and rather than accept that and the potential of having a major program cancelled, they look for a reason to accept the risk as-is.
The Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) is a perfect example of this. The high level design requirements–in no small part by Congressional committees which dictacted to which vendors major components would go and how the system would operate–resulted in a vehicle that was really not well suited to any particular task, and promises of reliability and availability which were absurd upon the face of it. (It should be noted that the technical design estimates of reliability predicted a 1-2% failure rate per mission, which nicely bounds the demonstrated reliability of the STS.) The Shuttle was also designed with the intent of being a part of an overall space architecture, including an orbital transfer vehicle (“space tug”) which could boost satellites from the Shuttle’s Low Earth Orbit capability to higher orbits (and more critically recover them for return for ground service and relaunch), a space station, deployable science and Earth surveillance experiments, et cetera. Instead, the budget for all of these applications was slashed, leaving the Shuttle as a passenger bus with low end heavy lift capability with nowhere interesteing to go. With the failure of Challenger causing NASA to no longer carry or return commercial payloads and the Air Force cancelling the “Blue Shuttle” program in favor of revived Titan, and Thor/Delta boosters (eventually culimating in the EELV program that gave us the current Atlas V and Delta IV) the Shuttle provided no useful capability other than putting people in orbit, and as it turns out, not especially reliabilty compared with the Apollo/Saturn system (although on a per capita basis, the STS had a technically higher demonstrated reliability owing to the large crew complement and extensive number of flights, the failure of two out of five of the orbiter fleet notwithstanding).
As for the need to conduct IRBs and anomaly reviews, this is done not as some kind of punitive measure for experiencing a failure or “make sure it is perfect”, but to understand the nature of the failure and draw conclusions on how to avoid future incidents, and thus not only the loss of life of the crew but the loss of extremely expensive and difficult-to-replace vehicle systems. (The orbiter was originally manufactured by Rockwell International, which no longer had all of the tooling and intact supplier chain to construct a new orbiter; OV-105 Endeavor was actually manufactured from structural and avionics spares for the other vehicles in the orbiter fleet.) Given the flaws in both the design and NASA safety culture uncovered during reviews for both the catastrophic loss of Challenger and Columbia, it is a very good thing that the time was spent before the system experienced another unexplained failure, allowing redesign of the flawed SRBs into the RSRM (which is one of the most reliable solid propellant rocket boosters ever flown by quantity) and understanding the launch conditions under which it was reasonable to fly the STS. You may regard this as a waste of time, but for engineers this is the process by which we learn what novel flaws and failure modes may be experienced by the system and design away such weaknesses in future systems.
Although I tend to agree that the profitable purely commercial applications in space are limited and only come after the basic technology and launch infrastructure have already been developed at greater cost than would be borne by private investors, there is certainly a place for commercial interests, and it should be noted that every orbital space launch vehicle every flown by the US has been constructed and largely managed by private contractors in conjuction with the US military and/or NASA. NASA has demonstrated a credible history in overseeing development of the necessary technology; unfortunately, like any government bureaucracy, it has also demonstrated a history of amassing large labor forces which do a lot of naval gazing and are not inclined to look for ways to reduce the labor and processing costs of space launch when the result would be a decrease in their own livelihood. There are shelves of studies from the US Air Force, Aerospace Corporation, private contractors, and NASA itself on reducing payload launch costs to LEO and beyond using conventional or just slightly advanced technologies and techniques and which have been judged as valid and achievable. Unfortunately, because they would contract the existing workforce or change the entrenched processing flow, they have not been applied. A private contractor managing the launch operations, on the other hand, has every incentive to increase efficiency, especially if they are selling launch services rather than just providing a vehicle and personnel at a cost-plus-profit basis. However, private contractors are also noted for cutting corners in order to increase profits, so some degree of independent safety and design oversight is necessary and prudent. (It should be noted that the recent Augustine Committee’s conclusions were that the NASA safety culture was so flawed that despite the internal oversight the reliability was not better than what would be expected from a commercial provider despite the cost, although we have only very sparse empirical data on the latter.)
The conclusions (of the Augustine Committee, and echoed elsewhere such as James Vedda’s Becoming Spacefarers–and which I am in agreement with–is that the role that NASA should play is developing technology, coordinating standards and practices, providing objective oversight, and judiciously and impartially advising Congress on which technologies and contractors are most favorable to invest in to advance the state-of-the-art. The role of actually launching payloads and crews into space should be largely transitioned to private, for-profit contractors who will look for ways to make the costs of space launch more reasonable and vehicles more reliable and quicker to produce and refurbish. We are currently at about the same state of art that we were circa 1990, when the National Launch System concept was being proposed, instead of implementing many of the innovations developed in the past twenty-five years.
As for colonizing space, or sending people to Mars, the asteroid belt, or beyond, it should be noted that the traditional goal of manned space programs has been “destination oriented”, e.g. the goal is to get to the Moon, get to a space station, go to Mars. This has been limiting in two different ways: one is that it forstalls development of technologies which are not germane to the particular goal (i.e. we don’t need an orbiting space station to go to the Moon); and second, it tends to limit the thinking on future applications such that once the goal is achieved, interest is lost. A more sustainable mode of development–if not as exciting to the casual space enthusiast crowd–is a capability-oriented program in which a series of steps to increase capabilities to go further in space, developed in-situ resources, and miitigate the significant hazards to personnel, such that it becomes possible and even inevitable to have a permanent self-sustaining human population in space. Although it doesn’t have the punch of landing on Mars and sticking a flag in the soil for a display of nationalistic pride, it does offer much greater potential to achieve actually useful scientific, commercial, and exploratory efforts. This also offers room to correctly and completely evolve the necessary technologies rather than to make a fitful “Hail Mary” leap, which if it fails results in dead crew and recriminations, and if it succeeds provides only a note in the history books with no enduring presence. A permanent space habitation capability will have to provide in-situ resource development and the ability to recreate Earth-like conditions in space habitations, not burrow under the surface of the Moon or Mars.
Regarding commercial interests in resource extraction, it is true that a resource would have to be extremely valuable to justify such expense. There are potential resources, such as platinum, cobalt, and copper (as well as rare earth metals which are available in terrestrial environments but are so costly and ecologically destructive to collect that it may well be cheaper to produce them in the future required quantities in space), and the potential for processing methods in microgravity which could as well justify the cost, but the real value of developing in-situ resource extraction and manufacturing is in not having to haul the goods and materials from the surface of the Earth at extreme cost and high risk. Once the necessary threshold for technology and infrastructure is achieved, it may be highly profitable to mine resources in space, but it is likely not work the oppotunity cost on a reasonable timescale for investors, hence again while NASA (or other government) efforts are necessary to develop the technology, just as the predecessors were to develop aviation and maritime technologies.
In short, I think that the it will ultimately be profitable and otherwise valuable (in terms of increasing our understanding of the universe, satisfying a desire to expand and explore without further damaging our planet, and helping to ensure survival of the human species in the case of planetary catastrophe) but it won’t occur in the short term and destination-oriented goals such as putting people on Mars for a brief sojourn of questionable scientific merit offer little in the way of advancing actual sustainable space habitation capability.
If we consider energy to be a reasonable standard for the amount of value in an economy, the economy of the Solar system could be very large indeed.
The Sun puts out a billion times as much energy as falls on the Earth; if we could intercept a portion of this, we could expand the human economy by a very large margin. Similarly there is a lot of other matter in the Solar System outside the Earth that could be processed into valuable commodities using that vast amount of energy; 400 times as much mass as the Earth not counting the Oort cloud and the outer atmosphere of the Sun.
Perhaps the easiest place to start would be Venus, which has very large amounts of carbon in its atmosphere. Solar powered orbital skimmers could extract this carbon, and build more skimmers. If carbon-based photovoltaic devices can be built (as seems likely) then this process can be made entirely self-supporting. A similar system could be employed on Mercury, using silicon photovoltaics.
Note that there isn’t much requirement for human presence in these initiatives; given competent automation, it could be done without much human intervention. This sort of industry, and the sort of mining that could occur in the asteroids and the moons and rings of the gas giants, don’t really demand that we colonise these worlds, just that we exploit them. Colonisation could come later once the infrastructure for exploitation is in place.
Alternatively we could just let the robots do it all, and colonise the solar system (and the rest of the galaxy) for their own purposes, whatever they may be.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
In short, I think that the it will ultimately be profitable and otherwise valuable (in terms of increasing our understanding of the universe, satisfying a desire to expand and explore without further damaging our planet, and helping to ensure survival of the human species in the case of planetary catastrophe) but it won’t occur in the short term and destination-oriented goals such as putting people on Mars for a brief sojourn of questionable scientific merit offer little in the way of advancing actual sustainable space habitation capability.
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This, as always, is where I disagree with you. Any realistic manned mission to Mars is going to entail the astronauts being on Mars for either several months or over a year. Even leaving aside the massive engineering it’s going to take to logistically support this, and all of the things we are going to learn just doing that, it’s not going to be a flags and footprints mission…it can’t be when they will be there so long. Questionable scientific merit? They will be there for months or over a year…they will be able to do more science just walking around than we have managed through years of robotic missions. They would be able to walk, on their own feet than the ranges of the current robotic explorers, and can do things in real time that robots simply can’t do.
I think a realistic mission to Mars would have a huge impact on both the scientific front AND on the engineering involved in ‘advancing actual sustainable space habitation capability’ and I’m frankly mystified by your continued stance on this to the contrary. How could it NOT vastly improve both things, give the realistic mission parameters???
I doubt there will be any significant colonization in the next 100 years. But I think robotics may eventually make colonization very cheap. That may take 300 years. Bring ice from the rings of Saturn to crash on the Moon to use for oxygen and fuel. Let robots do all of the work.
That’s not to say it would be economically profitable to try to mine such asteroids right now (or even possible at all for asteroids as big as 16-psyche).
But it’s not common knowledge how rich asteroids are in materials.
A company that managed to capture and return such an asteroid would do better blackmailing mining companies or trying to manipulate markets.
Really, mining asteroids is about reducing the cost of space exploration by building stuff in space itself.
If you successfully mine an asteroid and send the materials to earth, you easily flood the market and tank prices for iron, nickel, gold, or whatever you mined. You’d never recoup your costs that way. There’s only trillions of dollars worth of raw materials at current prices. Those prices plummet the instant we have an effectively infinite supply.
Instead, the idea is to use space resources to continue developing space. Rather than shipping up iron or platinum or any other expensive metals, we get them from asteroids and avoid dealing with big gravity wells in the first place.
If Earth was wiped out, a Mars base would fail as soon as supplies and/or spare parts ran out. We don’t have anywhere close to the level of technology needed to build a self-sustaining off-world colony.
Practically all of the cost of manned space travel is in keeping us fragile bags of protein and fluid provided with food, water, and oxygen, and protected from radiation and vacuum, during the journey. Send a robot, even a fancy one like Curiosity, in our place, and 99% of the cost goes away.
Robots are the future of space travel, at least for the next few decades. Once our robots get sophisticated enough that they can create a habitat for us on the moon, or on Mars, then it’ll be time for us to join them out there.
One thing I don’t understand, though, is why a nation with an interest in manned space travel can’t get back to the moon for cheap. You’d think they could take the design of the Apollo missions, do any simple and obvious upgrades that can be done with off-the-shelf technology (your phone is way smarter than the computers on the Apollo missions), and off they go. Nothing about getting a man to the moon and back is harder than it was in 1969, and a lot of that is now a lot easier.
That’s why we need to start building a colony. It won’t be self-sustaining on paper, we have to build it.
Might be a century or more before it’s truly a thriving colony.
But waiting to start doesn’t really shorten that time by much.
Actually, the problem is engineers and the single goal mentality. What is really needed is to establish the infrastructure for regular industrial use of space.
I see a good future in creating and maintaining very large geosynchrous broadcast satellites. Another obvious industry is LEO tourism. This would reuire cheap and simple launch and return vehicles, one for large cargo and one for people. It also requires the equivalent of construction site trailers - simple, cheap modular units, so a space habitat is not a one-off multi-billion dollar engineering contract. ( Bigelow Aerospace - Wikipedia )
It would also require fairly standard orbital rocketry - shuttles to move people from the protection of low orbit, up to build and maintain broadcast satellite monsters bigger than football fields. (again, modular). Modular orbital rockets could be modified to explore beyond Earth orbit. space suits, guidance systems, communications, etc. would have to be off-the-shelf.
China is already determined to reproduce parts of the US and Soviet programs to prove its technical prowess. Landing on the moon is probably not so far-fetched.
Much of the trillions a Mars mission would cost would be due to the design and engineering. The whole idea (never achieved) was that the shuttle fleet would have turnarounds measured in a week or two, not a year or two. Flight would be routine. Instead, each shot was a billion dollar enterprise.
Moon and Mars missions need to become more like a trip into the hinterland - we’ll buy these proven off-the-shelf pieces, have a small mission control group to help back home, and away we go. Standard rocket tech will work as orbital shuttles, moon landers, and with a bit of bolt-together, Mars landers. We can launch habitats and supplies ahead of time to ensure that there are no surprises on the trip - your home and air are waiting. there are 3 landers; there are 5 modules sitting on the surface waiting. etc.
The same applies to the moon. Once you can just as easily land on the moon as make earth orbit - someone with a few million will pay for a week on the moon.
The problem is that any realistic development plan for a low risk, high value manned Mars mission in foreseeable future is going to come with a single mission cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is because it would have to support the costs of not only the mission execution itself, but the development costs of suitable non-chemical propulsion system, development of a space habitat which provides protection from ever-present cosmic radiation and radiation bursts from solar flares and coronal mass ejection events, centrifugally simulated gravity (which is technically plausible but has never been demonstrated on a habitable scale), landing and return of a habitat-sized vessel onto the surface of Mars, in-situ resource utilization or the costly shipment of all necessary resources (fuel, air, food, and other supplies) with the mission, et cetera. Although space enthusiasts have glommed onto estimates like that promoted by Mars mission Robert Zubrin or Michael Collins which promise a single manned mission to Mars (with crew complements in the single digits with minimal tolerance for accidents or failures) of under US $100B, realistically the development and execution of a mission with a high probability of success (exceeding 95%) and genuinely useful scientific goals would likely be on close order of of US$500B (and the more we learn about the interplanetary environment, particularly human subsceptability to radiation, the most costly it becomes to mitigate).
And the solutions that are developed will be specific to executing the specific goals of the Mars mission rather than intented for general space habitation. This is exactly what happened with the Apollo program; the lack of well developed technologies for other missions, combined with a narrow focus on executing the singular “first man on the Moon” objective was the Achilles heel of the program, which was debudgeted nearly the moment Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the surface, and was cancelled before it could even fulfill the entire roster of planned missions. The fact that it was able to accelerate the development timescale with all-up integrated testing and press forward into orbital and lunar missions ahead of schedule was its own undoing, allowing critics to vilify NASA for “wasting” extra money for planning tasks and developing capabilities which weren’t necessary to achieve the primary objective.
Also, the failure of a one-offed manned interplanetary mission, especially if due to meeting unrealistic scheudules using immature technology would probably spell the death knell for manned exploration for the foreseeable future, with critics screaming (not without justice) the placing of astronauts at risk in order to satisfy national pride or overambitious geekdom with minimal practical return. The US only got away with taking the chances and suffereing failures during the Apollo program because it was a proxy battle between ideologically opposed superpowers; this environment doesn’t exist today, and despite the vocal approval by the small minority of the population of space enthusiasts, the general public could give fuck-all about space exploration and future opportunities it may provide their grandchildren.
As for the scientific merit of a manned Mars mission, proponents often espouse how much more and much further a manned crew could do versus the slowly creeping rovers. This ignores the point (as stated by RTFirefly) that the vast majority of the cost of any manned mission is the cost of keeping the people in livable shape during the entire mission. Even for missions to LEO, a conservative estimate is that 90% of the cost is in transporting and protecting the human cargo, which rarely perform tasks which cannot be done by ground control or automated systems. For extended duration missions, the costs rise to an excess of 98% (Lunar landing) and perhaps half an order of magnitude more expensive for interplanetary missions (Mars). That means for the cost of a manned mission at, say US$500, one could easily launch hundreds of robotic probes which could surveil and traverse more of the Martian service than any single human mission could possibly perform, without even considering that probes can operate continuously as long as they have power while human crews need rest, food, and protected environments, as well as having to provide suitable human-machine interfaces to equipment which will be larger and more bulky than the instruments themselves compared to those installed on rovers like the Mars Science Laboratory (“Curiosity”). I’ve previously offered [post=14496683]a head-to-head comparison between the capabilities and requirements for a human mission versus a robotic one[/post] which clearly indicates why unmanned missions are a better value for the science data they provide, notwithstanding the potential for contaminating the search for signs of life with terrestrial bacteria.
A manned Mars mission is not a realistic goal today, or indeed, within the next few decades without revolutionary advances in propulsion and habitat science, and the public is not going to be willing to pony up the development of the necessary technologies for a single mission pricetag in the hundreds of billions of dollars. However, more modest evolutionary developments in basic capabilities in space resource use and (eventually) habitation will eventually lower the threshold costs of such a mission while providing solutions to mitigate the presently identified hazards. Trying to go to Mars “today” (e.g. within the next twenty years) is like trying to cross the North Atlantic in a kayak. Developing the necessary technology (in this analogy, sailing and steam vessels) will give substantially better chances of success, greater mission capabilities, and an ultimately sustainable logistical and contingency chain to allow genuine autonomous habitation. I know this isn’t what the space geeks want to hear, nor what the overly optimistic but technically naive enthusiasts espouse, but it is what practicing engineers and scientists in the aerospace and space technology fields know to be realistic given the state-of-the-art.
We’re not going to send a manned mission to Mars until/unless the global economy is at least an order of magnitude greater than it is in 2013.
A manned mission to Mars is something you do for fun because you’ve got plenty of money to spend on cool stuff.
The problem is that a mission to Mars is a lot harder than touching down on the Moon for a few days and heading back home. It would require development of all sorts of new technologies, a list as long as your arm.
The notion that this would be great because once the technology was developed for the Mars mission we’d be able to use it for other missions misses the point. Technological advances can be force-fed to an extent, but you can’t build a railroad without a suite of technologies already in place. Without those you’ve got a fun toy, but not a viable technology.
We look at the tremendous advancement of rocketry from the 40s to the 50s to the 60s, and expect that hey, we’ve advanced so much in three decades, think about what we can accomplish in the next three decades. Except we’ve only made incremental improvements to rocketry since the 60s. Rocketry is a mature technology, just like planes, trains, and automobiles.
Yes, we can make superadvanced bullet trains. Except we don’t do that by inventing brand new technologies, we already know how to build bullet trains, we just don’t want to because they cost a lot of money. We can build a rocket to the moon, but it’s not going to be substantially different than the rockets to the moon in the 60s, because the technology for building gigantic rockets was solved in the 60s, and we’re not going to get a much better giant rocket today.
The mission payload could be substantially better–we could include all sorts of miniaturized instruments and control systems that didn’t exist in the 60s. But the basic plan would be exactly the same–build a giant tube of explosives with a capsule on top and set it off. It takes the exact same delta-V to put a kilogram of payload into orbit in 2013 as it did in 1973. We’re marginally better at putting stuff into space.
But 1950s science fiction rockets where you load up with thorium and hydrogen, point the nose at the mars and blast off, and when you reach mars turn around and blast home are physically impossible because it doesn’t matter how efficient your nuclear reactor is, you can only carry so much reaction mass, and carrying more reaction mass doesn’t help because almost all the work you do with that extra reaction mass is wasted in moving around the reaction mass itself.
And so either we get rich enough that we can afford to spend a trillion dollars to go to Mars for fun, or we invent some new technologies that allow us to travel to Mars a lot more easily. But we aren’t going to invent those technologies by shoving more and more money at a mission to Mars, we’re going to invent those technologies by spending more and more money on basic science and education. And there’s no timeline because we’re going to have to invent the technologies needed to invent the technologies needed to invent the technologies.
This, and maybe the idea of moving some really dirties industries off the planet (in fact, mining would be chief among them) would be the real practical benefit of something that approaches colonization.
$500 billion for a Mars colony isn’t that outrageous, actually. That’s half the cost of the War on Drugs.
And all the money stays here on Earth, we don’t launch the money. Plus, we can make other nations chip in on it.
I think one short term benefit would be Antarctic colonization as a side effect of Mars colonization.
The two environments are similar in many ways, and learning about one helps us understand the other.
There’s a lot of minerals and other resources there, if we could harvest it responsibly.
Going there today might be like rowing a canoe across the ocean.
So what? The Vikings did it, and Columbus didn’t have much better.
$500B is the estimate for a single mission. The cost to develop a self-sustaining colony is incalculable, as we don’t even have the technology to do this. And we can’t “make other nations chip in on it”, especially given the way in which we have spontaneously and ignominiously dropped the ball on committments to ESA and JAXA on joint financial and technical support for their missions.
The problem with trying to conduct or plan such a mission using current technology is twofold; one is that, again, failure of such a “pull out all the stops” mission would spell an end to all manned exploration, and even a success would probably engender the same kind of indifference as the Apollo program did once we reached the Moon. Without a fiscally or politically valid reason to maintain a presence in space a longer term effort to fully develop and mature the necessary technologies and techniques would not be sustained. The other is that the “opportunity cost” of conducting such a mission would absorb the bulk of monies available for space exploration and detract from the cost to develop more sustainable technologies, e.g. extraction of materials from asteroids, construction of large scale habitats, development of planetary meteor defense, space manufacturing infrastructure, robotic exploration of other (and frankly scientifically and materially more interesting bodies). So, instead of developing the technology to a point that such a mission is easy and low risk, going for a high risk stunt mission (“Let’s put people on Mars to…walk around and dig a bit!”) detracts from both objectives today and advances in the future which actually accomplish the supposed goals of space advocates.
I know it seems like we should just jump in head first and do as much as possible, and somehow success (both of the mission and future developments) will come. But it is precisely that approach which has failed to develop space technology to the extent reasonably imagined by advocates in the 1950s. For both political-fiscal and technical reasons, it is just the wrong approach which will lead nowhere even if it is successful. It isn’t enough to make space enthusiasts and planetary scientists happy; if a program is going to spend tens or hundreds of billions of tax dollars, it has to show some benefit to the population at large, as space surveillance and GPS have (albeit after decades of effort in development).
A more carefully planned and measured approach, which provides broad material and fiscal benefit and creates an architecture for future exploration and an infrastructure for sustainable habitation and manufacturing is crucial in order to maintain a long term space development and exploration program. Going to a single objective–even with developing the technology to do so–does not provide for that system.
In other words, if you want to see a Mars colony, the fastest way is to fund elementary schools in Africa to teach girls to read. If a billion of those kids grew up to be doctors, scientists, mathematicians, inventors and engineers instead of subsistence farmers then they’d be able to contribute enough excess capacity to the global economy that by then a mission to Mars would be easy.
Personally, I’m optimistic for space colonies and routine trips to other planets within 50 years, and I would be astounded if we don’t get it within 100. No, we don’t have the technology for it now. But we will. Especially since some of the key technological breakthroughs would have huge implications right here on Earth, too, so they won’t need to be driven by something like NASA.
We barely have the attention span, as a race, to wait for the next season of our favorite TV shows to hit the air.
Manned Mars missions died with Challenger, IMO - not just because of the setbacks to manned spaceflight due to the disaster, but because of the societal changes since then.
“Oh, it’s too hard, it costs too much, it’d take 20 years or more, why bother when I won’t get to see it or any benefits from it, wahhhh … ooh, American Idol is on…”
I blame the Internet, cable TV, and video games (no, really) - and not just for this, for a myriad of problems we face today, and going forward.
