But in case you hadn't noticed, we aren't doing either the manned mission OR a swarm of robots. Just a slow drip feed of medium ambition missions, drip, drip, drip.
Yet right now I am less convinced by the "we can't afford it!" Bullsh*t than ever. The US government can pull an extra 50 billion dollars out of the thin air to bolster their already preposterously overfunded and undercapable military. That same money could have paid the necessary costs for NASA to put a mission on Mars. The US has shown it is rather better at space exploration than it is at toppling sovereign nations, and it can be furthering the knowledge of Humanity whilst they are at it so as far as I'm concerned that's a display of truly woeful priorities.
The Iraq war cost $2 trillion. America could have built a city on the Moon with that money, and as pointless as that would be it would still have been money better spent.
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Michael say: Realistic & if they run experiments on the information I gave them. It might not be that costly after all. They say it will take a year, but they wont need to use a lot of fuel to do it. My info. came from Werner Von Brown, one of my father's coworkers at NASA'S Redstone Arsenal in 1965. Mike
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Nyx say: It's about as realistic,and necessary as any other human endeavor that requires exploration, and risk.
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Quadrillian say: Neither.
Cheers!
and btw: I agree with you totally, except to say that for the same funding we could release 500 unmanned missions to just about everywhere in the solar system. It all comes down to what you would rather see: some poor idiot incinerated during reentry to Mars, or thousands of breathtaking panoramas from the most exotic places in the solar system.
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Brigalow Bloke say: Plans exist for all sorts of unlikely or likely things. Some are military and not made public for obvious reasons, others are like a manned Mars mission, not intended to be put into practice today or next year. These are likely to be only sketch plans at present, exploring the possibilities and the likely problems. People are employed to do this and it's relatively cheap.
If you were to think about travel to another country, would you not have some kind of plan in mind such as return fare, medical and travel insurance, itinerary etc? Because you make a plan, does not mean you have to go.
I would not worry about it. No space agency including NASA can afford a manned Mars mission now or in the next few decades. If NASA is lucky it might be able to manage an automated Mars sample return mission before 2030 but to be blunt I doubt it.
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Hindusufi say: It is not necessary. Also, it means subjecting people to hard radiation for a six month transit time, and then again on the way back to earth, that is just plain unethical. I hope that at least my country has no involvement in this.
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Jordan say: It is realistic
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