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Mars instead of Moon? Report demands NASA plans be overhauled
Published: 23 October, 2009, 01:59
Edited: 25 October, 2009, 03:39
A new report suggests that NASA should prepare a major overhaul in the national space exploration program, which could lead to boosting cooperation between nations in space, space expert John Manber told RT.
We should continue to explore space but with several countries doing it together. India sent a craft to the moon in june to find water. We are doing the same thing. Crazy spending duplicate monies to do the same thing.
Well, I am all for international cooperation and avoiding a unilateralist mentality that raises costs and denies us the opportunity of improving international relations; but I am also for us reaching new impressive benchmarks. And in particular, I want us to leave low Earth orbit. We've been dithering there for over 40 years now. It is true that the Mir and the ISS were admirable accomplishments, but it is high time we commenced new longer-distance manned missions. I fear choosing Mars over the Moon may even further delay the renewed onset of such missions and would leave us with inadequate expertise in the particulars of human survival in isolation of frequent supplies from the Earth. Transit to Mars would be eased and made safer by intermediate steps that pioneered the perquisite technologies. The long-term utility of all of this, as far as I am concerned, is the spread of permanent human habitation beyond the Earth. Likewise, that will require intermediate steps, a lot of them, and it may be unrealistic to expect it could occur in my lifetime. I don't doubt that it's a long way off, but, besides an arguably indefensible degree of vanity, it is the truly valid justification for continued manned missions now that robots can basically do all the scientific surveying in a more cost effective manner than people can.
There is potentially a bit more to this than meets the eye. It has been suggested that a program capable of reaching the planets will, by default, be more than capable of reaching the moon, so no need to aim for the moon. The 'sugesstion' continues that by allowing the moon to be shared (possibly with India, china, and maybe Russia), the big prize - Mars - can be claimed along with all the potential resouces the planet has to offer. By taking 'one step back to take 3 steps forward' the US may be making a very astute move to secure future resources that will be out of the reach of other nations for some time. If true, very clever indeed.
The US has shifted much of the space responsibility onto Russia, it seems. Sputnik did call for reform of American schools and caused our nation to reexamine our morals, however. It was a good slap in the face. The decision to go to the moon was more political than scientific. A report is not going to spark a new space race. Our political ideologies aren't separated enough at the moment. It is more likely that Russia will become somewhat of a space headquarters until it accumulates some wealth then it can slap us in the face again and spark a new race.