We killed the space program thirty years ago so we could spend more money on poor people.
We still have poor people thirty years later, so I would say it was a bad bargain.
We originally went to the moon in ships that had all the on-board computing power of a gameboy, or maybe not that much. And we made it there and back again and again. This is not something we can’t do, we’ve done it. Returning to the moon should not be a twenty year project, making it a twenty year project is the same as killing it. Make it a priority to be achieved within the administration of a single president. If we went from scratch to the moon in eight years time, having to invest everything as we go, we should be able to get back there in three or four. We just have to want to.
And whatever it takes to put a habitat on the moon, we should be able to be on Mars 12 years after that. The bottleneck is in will more than anything.
“The bottleneck is in will more than anything.”
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I’d add, money.