BS: Mankind and Mars

Subject: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:26 AM

Time to Boldly Go Once More

By Buzz Aldrin
Thursday, July 16, 2009

On the spring morning in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh set off alone across the Atlantic Ocean, only a handful of explorer-adventurers were capable of even attempting the feat. Many had tried before Lindbergh's successful flight, but all had failed and many lost their lives in the process. Most people then thought transatlantic travel was an impossible dream. But 40 years later, 20,000 people a day were safely flying the same route that the "Lone Eagle" had voyaged. Transatlantic flight had become routine.

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I began our quarter-million-mile journey through the blackness of space to reach the moon.

Neil and I walked its dusty ancient soil, becoming the first humans to stand upon another world. Yet today, no nation -- including our own -- is capable of sending anyone beyond Earth's orbit, much less deeper into space.

For the past four years, NASA has been on a path to resume lunar exploration with people, duplicating (in a more complicated fashion) what Neil, Mike and our colleagues did four decades ago. But this approach -- called the "Vision for Space Exploration" -- is not visionary; nor will it ultimately be successful in restoring American space leadership. Like its Apollo predecessor, this plan will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies.

Instead, I propose a new Unified Space Vision, a plan to ensure American space leadership for the 21st century. It wouldn't require building new rockets from scratch, as current plans do, and it would make maximum use of the capabilities we have without breaking the bank. It is a reasonable and affordable plan -- if we again think in visionary terms.

On television and in movies, "Star Trek" showed what could be achieved when we dared to "boldly go where no man has gone before." In real life, I've traveled that path, and I know that with the right goal and support from most Americans, we can boldly go, again.
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A race to the moon is a dead end. While the lunar surface can be used to develop advanced technologies, it is a poor location for homesteading. The moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things. And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or inspire the support and enthusiasm of the public and the next generation of space explorers.

Now, I am not suggesting that America abandon the moon entirely, only that it forgo a moon-focused race. As the moon should be for all mankind, we should return there as part of an internationally led coalition. Using the landers and heavy-lift boosters developed by our partners, we could test on the moon the tools and equipment that we will need for our ultimate destination: homesteading Mars by way of its moons. "

---

I would like to believe Buzz ALdrin is right, that our species will aim for and land on Mars.

And then, who knows?

But to make it happen, what has to be overcome?

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: katlaughing
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:38 AM

Our desire to mutilate and destroy our own home before we "homestead" on any other.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Stu
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:41 AM

Two issues here as far as I'm concerned:

1) Although the US currently lead in getting people and stuff into space, a more forward vision would be one pooling all the expertise available in the field from across the globe and call it the Human Unified Space Vision so it becomes inclusive rather than divisive - rather than looking to lead and dominate we should be looking to sharing and listening. A joint effort for all our sakes, to inspire innovation and encourage the thinkers amongst us.

2) Our world is run politically and commercially by small people with small imaginations. They can't see a greater vision for humanity but are too busy squabbling or lining their own pockets, and letting us all down in the process. We need leadership from someone with the courage to unite us all and not put national interests first. If that person actually existed, I suspect everyone in Africa might have clean drinking water as that's a heck of a lot easier to achieve than going to Mars.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: john f weldon
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:47 AM

The continuation of Large Scale Fuel-Consumers is happily waning; it was a sixties thing. In the interim, computer technology has blossomed, and brought us the wholesome alternative of the very small.

We can now send our small robots with their modest needs anywhere in the solar system. To a large extent we have done so, even landing on some of those Jupiter moons that Galileo was punished for seeing.

This is cheaper and far more interesting than watching bozos in diapers play golf on the Moon.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:48 AM

Jack:

ISn't that unified vision exactly what Buzz ALdrin suggests?

On your second point, I think Kennedy made it clear that the fact we have never done something is no reason not to do it. Breaking the grip of inertia, mental turgidity and short-sighted fatheadedness is our most important capability, if we can do it. Leadership, demand, politics, and personal profit within reason can all be brought bear to support the vision as easily as to oppose it if the management skill is present.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Peace
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 10:57 AM

If we do not establish 'bases' elsewhere, if this place ever has a disaster--asteroid strike, atomic war, bio-war, global warming on a scale we're unlikely to survive as a species--then that's it for humans (as we know them and are). It just makes good sense. The Irish Potato Famine lasted five years, but during that time 40% of the Irish population either died or left Ireland. Without an attempt to build a 'country cottage' somewhere else, we'd have NO place to go.

I Will Not Go Down Under the Ground
By Bob Dylan (1962)

I will not go down under the ground because someone tells me that death's comin' round
I will not carry myself down to die when I go to my grave my head will be high

CHO:
Let me die in my footsteps before I'll go down under the ground

There's been rumors of ways and wars that have been
The meaning of life has been lost in the wind
Some people are thinkin' that the end is close by
Instead of learning to live they are learning to die. (CHO.)

I don't think I'm smart but I think I can see
When someone is pulling the wool over me
And if there's a war and death comes around
Let me die on this land 'for I'll die underground. (CHO.)

There's always been people that have to cause fear
They've been talking about war for many long years
I've read all their statements and not said a word
And now, Lord God, let my poor voice be heard. (CHO.)

If I had riches and rubies and crowns
I'd buy the whole world and I'd change things around
I'd throw all the tanks and the guns in the sea
For they all are mistakes of our past history. (CHO.)

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flow
Let the smell of wild flowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with your green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brothers in peace. (CHO.)

Go out in your country where the land meets the sun
See the meadows and mountains where the wild waters run
Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho
Let every state in the Union seep deep down in your soul. (CHO.)

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: catspaw49
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 11:14 AM

"We can now send our small robots with their modest needs anywhere in the solar system. To a large extent we have done so, even landing on some of those Jupiter moons that Galileo was punished for seeing.

This is cheaper and far more interesting than watching bozos in diapers play golf on the Moon."


Its an old argument and it was even used often in the 60's. Why send some "bozo in diapers" when we could send a robot or some type of "lander?"

How old are you John and do you really remember the space program? In the minds of the general public, the thing that really drove the program was those bozos you refer to. Sputnik was a frightening at first but from that point on nobody cared about things where ther were no men involved. Dogs and chimps were entertaining but Gagarin became a Soviet Hero with day long ceremonies on the Square. Alan Shepard rode a cannonball lob shot for a short 300 miles and got a ticker tape parade in NYC and a medal from JFK!

There have been very successful unmanned projects but like Tom Wolfe said in "THe Right Stuff"............No bucks and no Buck Rogers..........and we were willing to pay for Buck Rogers! Nobody really gave two shits about lunar probes or anything else that didn't have a man with it. The thrill of "being there" even in such a vicarious manner was all important.

Just my opinion maybe, but to the general public, I think it still is.


Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Rapparee
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 12:12 PM

Go. Built it -- on the Moon, on Mars. As we do we'll learn more and more ways to clean up the mess here.

For instance: why is everyone wasting "waste water?" Why not clean it up -- and I mean your sewage as well -- and reuse it? It's already being done on a small scale out here in The West -- why isn't it done in NYC or LA? We learned to do it from the ISS and its predecessors.

As a solution to population pressure space travel as we have it now will never solve the problem (and Malthus was right -- we've just delayed the inevitable in "developed countries". But it CAN allow the race to survive, and as a "homo semi-sapiens" I'd like to see that.

I won't get into the old, old "it costs more than it's worth" argument. I will simply offer ANYONE the cost to the average taxpayer of the US Space Program from 1960 to July, 1969 IF that person contracts to never again use ANYTHING derivative from the Space Program.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 12:16 PM

On the first day...

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Wesley S
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 12:18 PM

Spaw nailed it.

And yes - we should try to go to Mars. The quest for knowledge will benifit us all.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 12:26 PM

More than that, I think it was profoundly demonstrated when the first "Blue Marble" images came back to Earth, and many people realized what a small colony the human race really is, and how interdependent, on how small a whizzing outpost... When man on earth can look into space and find a place in the cosmos and say "We are there, too; and I am one of us.", why then we have a species instead of a gang of fragmented neurotic tribes.

That is important for the future. Lives depend on it.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: john f weldon
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 01:05 PM

That's a new one; berated for my apparent youth! I'm actually kinda flattered.
(by the way - born 1945)
Thanks, Spaw.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: catspaw49
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 01:25 PM

LOL....You're welcome....or should I say you're weldon.............

I wasn't meaning to berate you at all, but I recall so much of the interest was human related and I doubt we'd have ever funded much without the human factor.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Rapparee
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 02:10 PM

...Manhattan Project....

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: catspaw49
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 02:17 PM

....as in what? We didn't know what we were funding or do you mean something else?

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Rapparee
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 03:23 PM

Well, the human interest factor in nuclear research isn't very high, no matter HOW important the work is.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 07:18 PM

I wonder if it would be possible, whoever goes where, for them boldly to go, or to go, boldly, etc.

Please?

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 16 Jul 09 - 07:18 PM

It will create a much better impression on the aliens if we speak better English.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 03:52 AM

Richard Hoagland - Facebook - (open page, I hope! :0) )

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Penny S.
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 04:18 AM

Some time ago there was a science fiction haiku web site, for which I wrote this, only to find the site defunct for posting.

Terraformation:
Spring touches Martian hillsides,
Soiled, where once untouched.

Knowing one of the major proponents of the process, the thought of people with the attitude he showed going there was not encouraging. I suspect we would not be sending the best of Earth out homesteading.

Penny

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 06:01 AM

Poem 79 of 230: PIE IN THE SKY?

From our early childhood,
    We're taught to glorify
Conquering the Earth's neighbourhood -
    Shouldn't we question why?

Satellites can aid sibling-hood,
    But some missions could buy
A start for millions to make good -
    Is Mars "pie in the sky"?

From http://walkaboutsverse.sitegoz.com (e-scroll)
Or http://blogs.myspace.com/walkaboutsverse (e-book)

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Stu
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 07:30 AM

"ISn't that unified vision exactly what Buzz ALdrin suggests?"

To me living outside the US Aldrin's comments seem to suggest the Americans should lead the the entire effort - he mentions "American space leadership" three times.

Rightly or wrongly, this sort of rhetoric gets the hackles of up of many people who don't live in the US. People don't want to be led by America - surely that message should have got through by now. It would be unimaginable exploring space without the benefit of the sacrifices made by the heros of the American space programme, without the US playing a massive role in the whole enterprise. However, others have sacrificed much for space exploration too and we should pool all these resources in their memory.

This is bigger than a single country, bigger than any nation regardless of who has the deepest pockets or the expertise (which now includes many people across the world). I agree with Spaw, people need to get out there and thing the first flag on Mars should not be the flag of any nation, but one that represents humanity as a whole.

I can remember watching the later moonwalks on TV here in the UK, and the whole world felt it was not a nation but humanity that had got to the moon; now we could truly make that dream a reality. It's the most noble of endeavours.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Stu
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 09:53 AM

For those who want a realtime view of events, this is excellent:

wechoosethemoon.org.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 11:53 AM

The notion of US space leadership is largely a matter of track record and PR. The concept of an astronaut brins to mind a vivid image of a guy in a space suit, leaping over moonrocks or floating in endless black space near an orbiting craft, and if you look close, he has a little American flag on his shoulder. Yuri Gargarin just didn't have the PR support that NASA gave its boys. That is not to make less of the ESA's accomplishments, or for that matter the Japanese and Chinese and Russian accomplishments.   But the leadership began, globally, when Kennedy said "We choose the moon...".



A

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: beardedbruce
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 01:40 PM

An interesting view.


"The Moon We Left Behind

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 17, 2009

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama's Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy's enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the international space station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don't we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we'd waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we'd still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of -- environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.

How could we? "





On a different point, it would be ( realatively) easy to terraform Mars. All it would take is the collision of a number of chunks of ice ( from Saturn's rings- far less distance gravitationally than Earth) into the surface to get the oceans and water vapor up. Get the greenhouse effect started ( since so little CO2 will do it, far less than is already on Mars), seed those new oceans with algae, and voila!


Calculations show that the atmospheric pressure is not much below were people live in the Andes on Earth, at least in the canyons (and perhaps in the basins, but they will be under water). One would just need a mask providing pressure ( sort of like a supercharger on a gas mask.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Peter T.
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 02:36 PM

I think we are not ready to go to Mars or anywhere else actually. We need to earn the right, and we are currently destroying this planet. I don't mean focussing on this planet as if it were some kind of narcissism or lessening of the human prospect -- I mean that we understand too little of ourselves as earthlings to be of any use elsewhere in the universe. We will only carry -- like the first explorers of North America -- the germs of our own stupidity and carelessness elsewhere.

I didn't use to think like this. One of the happiest hours of my life was spend in the company of Gus Grissom, when I was a kid, and we talked about space and the future and what it was going to be like. When he died I mourned for days.   But it was a romantic gesture, and like many of those gestures, good for what it was. I think we need to pause and save ourselves here first.

yours,

Peter T.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 03:20 PM

There are four issues on which our destiny as a species hinges, and about which we are sadly behind the curve.

One is space, much discussed here and above and elsewhere. The second is energy, the third water, as critical hinge-points of our management ability and our executive skills.

The fourth is our own sanity, about which we have a pathetic paucity of reliable learning and a huge bucketful of bull to wade through to find it.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 09 - 10:47 AM

But madcap or not, let us go, let us go.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Peter T.
Date: 18 Jul 09 - 03:22 PM

Stay. Pay Attention. Learn. Become wiser, less arrogant. Rushing off to nowhere in particular solves nothing. Without going out of your door, you can know the ways of heaven -- and earth.

Peter T.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Don Firth
Date: 18 Jul 09 - 04:12 PM

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.
                                                                         —Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 18 Jul 09 - 05:14 PM

Can't help thinking of H G Wells and his vision of Mars... far better that we learn to live on this planet before we go screwing up another...

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 19 Jul 09 - 12:53 PM

"If we do not establish 'bases' elsewhere, if this place ever has a disaster--asteroid strike, atomic war, bio-war, global warming on a scale we're unlikely to survive as a species--"

I very much doubt whether having a 'base' on Mars will make any difference to our survival as a species. I suspect that the only thing that will ensure our survival will be a fully functioning Earth - screw this planet up and we're 'toast' - no matter how many bases we have elsewhere. A 'base' would probably not be big enough to hold a viable breeding population.

"On a different point, it would be ( realatively) easy to terraform Mars. All it would take is the collision of a number of chunks of ice ( from Saturn's rings- far less distance gravitationally than Earth) into the surface to get the oceans and water vapor up. Get the greenhouse effect started ( since so little CO2 will do it, far less than is already on Mars), seed those new oceans with algae, and voila!"

Oh, really? And how long do you think it would take for it all to reach some form of equlibrium? What if it all 'runs away' and all you're left with (after several centuries) is a warm, mouldy soup? Would it ever be possible to establish any sort of stable eco-system in any meaningful time-frame?

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Jul 09 - 06:09 AM

Shimrod,

Terraforming is usually talked about in a framework of centuries. The point is to replace the water lost due to the lower gravity- if it continues to be lost, just arrange a few more collisions with ice chunks or comets every decade or so ( into the (larger, form water vapor) atmosphere).

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Jul 09 - 08:25 AM

Apollo 11 crew: Moon less interesting than Mars
         
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – 2 hrs 9 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The first astronauts to walk on the moon want President Barack Obama to aim for a new destination: Mars.

On Monday, the Apollo 11 crewmen, fresh from a Washington lecture Sunday in which two of them expressed concerns about NASA getting bogged down on the moon, are meeting with Obama at the White House.

In one of their few joint public appearances, the crew of Apollo 11 spoke on the eve of the 40th anniversary of man's first landing on the moon, but didn't get soggy with nostalgia. They instead spoke about the future and the more distant past.

Sunday night, a packed crowd at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum — 7,000 people applied in a lottery for 485 seats — didn't get the intimate details of the Eagle's landing on the moon with little fuel left, or what the moon looked like, or what it felt like to be there.

They got second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin's pitch for Mars. He said the best way to honor the Apollo astronauts "is to follow in our footsteps; to boldly go again on a new mission of exploration."

First man on the moon Neil Armstrong only discussed Apollo 11 for about 11 seconds. He gave a professorial lecture titled "Goddard, governance and geophysics," looking at the inventions and discoveries that led to his historic "small step for a man" on July 20, 1969.

Armstrong said the space race was "the ultimate peaceful competition: USA versus USSR. It did allow both sides to take the high road with the objectives of science and learning and exploration."

Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins, who circled the moon alone while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on it, said the moon was not interesting, but Mars is.

"Sometimes I think I flew to the wrong place. Mars was always my favorite as a kid and it still is today," Collins said. "I'd like to see Mars become the focus, just as John F. Kennedy focused on the moon."

The man who founded and directed Mission Control Houston, Christopher Kraft Jr., also jumped on the go-somewhere-new, do-something-different bandwagon.

"What we need is new technology; we have not had that since Apollo," Kraft said as part of the lecture at the Smithsonian. "I say to Mr. Obama: Let's get on with it. Let's invest in the future."

As the men of NASA of the 1960s talked about new technology and new goals, the current NASA is still looking back at the moon.

NASA is still marching toward a goal of returning to the moon of Armstrong and Aldrin and this time putting a base there. The current plan is based on building new rockets that the former NASA administrator called "Apollo on steroids," with an alternative — a derivative of the space shuttle — floating through the space agency.

Although they didn't directly criticize NASA's current plans, Aldrin and Collins said the moon is old hat. Collins said he is afraid that NASA's exploration plans would be bogged down by a return visit to the moon.

Aldrin presented an elaborate slide detailing how to make a quick visit to the moon a stepping stone to visits to the Martian moon Phobos, Mars itself, and even some asteroids like Apophis that may someday hit Earth. Aldrin said he and Armstrong landed on the moon 66 years after the Wright brothers first flew an airplane. What he would like would be for humanity to land on Mars 66 years after his flight. That would be 2035.

And even though Armstrong didn't talk about the future in his 19-minute discourse, Aldrin dragged his commander onto the Mars bandwagon anyway. "It was a great personal honor to walk on the moon, but as Neil once observed, there are still places to go beyond belief," he said. "Isn't it time to continue our journey outward, past the moon?"

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: folk1e
Date: 20 Jul 09 - 10:00 AM

It looks like I have a somewhat jaundiced view of the "moon race". Unlike most others I saw (and still see) it as a way of forcing America's biggest rival Russia into an economic war they were unlikely to win!
The whole ethos of NASA became "lets beat them pesky reds"! I have heard American arms manufacturers toting similar scaremongering tactics ever since in order to bolster their share of the arms race profits.
There is however a new kid on the block in China who will be in a similar position as America to push toward the goal of Mars.


Interesting times indeed!

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: SINSULL
Date: 20 Jul 09 - 10:44 AM

I honestly believed when I was in my 20s that I would have the opportunity to travel in space. I remember a promotion by a travel agency - deposit $100,000 and reserve a seat on the first commercial tour of outer space. Leonard Nimoy had a seat. I ached to go.
It has been a bitter disappointment. It is bizarre that we reached the moon and then lost interest - although that is not quite true. The reality is that unless there is a reason to invest billions in space travel, it is not going to happen. War and money fuel our choices.

Subject: RE: BS: Mankind and Mars
From: beardedbruce
Date: 22 Jul 09 - 09:21 AM

New NASA boss: Astronauts on Mars in his lifetime
AP - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 2:15:48 PM By SETH BORENSTEIN


NASA's new boss said Tuesday he will be "incredibly disappointed" if people aren't on Mars -- or venturing somewhere beyond it -- in his lifetime.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., who's 62, said his ultimate goal isn't just Mars -- it's anywhere far from Earth.

"I did grow up watching Buck Rogers, and Buck Rogers didn't stop at Mars," Bolden said in an interview with The Associated Press. "In my lifetime, I will be incredibly disappointed if we have not at least reached Mars."

That appears to be a shift from the space policy set in motion by the Bush administration, which proposed first returning to the moon by 2020 and then eventually going to Mars a decade or two later. Bolden didn't rule out using the moon as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond. But he talked more about Mars than the moon as NASA was still celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Bolden said NASA and other federal officials had too many conflicting views about how to get to Mars, including the existing Constellation project begun under President George W. Bush. That project calls for returning to the moon first, with a moon rocket design that Bolden's predecessor called "Apollo on steroids." NASA has already spent $6.9 billion on that plan.

"We cannot continue to survive on the path that we are on right now," Bolden told NASA employees in a televised speech earlier Tuesday.

A new independent commission is reviewing that plan and alternatives to it.

Bolden said in an interview that his main job over the next few months will be to champion an "agreed-upon compromise strategy to get first to Mars and then beyond. And we don't have that yet."

Bolden met with President Barack Obama on Monday, and some experts said he seems to be signaling a refocusing of NASA's general exploration plan.

A former astronaut, Bolden also vowed to extend the life of the international space station beyond 2016, the year the Bush administration planned to abandon it.

As one way to help fund a new moon rocket, the Bush administration had proposed not paying for the space station beyond 2015 -- even as astronauts are currently in space building additions to it. And just last week, the space station program manager told The Washington Post that the plan was to guide the $100 billion station into the ocean at the end of its life.

"We have an incredible asset in the international space station that we need to preserve," Bolden said. The idea, he said, is to make the station work to further "our strong desire to leave the planet and leave low Earth orbit."