Presidents love to come out and say we're going to Mars. Bush was going to take us to Mars. President Trump is taking us to Mars. Hillary was going to take us to Mars. I'm sure they would all love to be at the helm when we finally get to Mars, but as of yet, no Mars. President Kennedy took "Great America" to the Moon, but I wouldn't place good money on "Not Great so Much America" Getting off the planet again any time soon.
Call me cynical.
Hogwash.
Unless those guys at the bottom are our current Astronauts i have NO IDEA what you’re trying to convey.
Show four of the nastiest gang members the year we went to the moon. We still got there.
Your negativeness is a constant through your posts and you need to get rid of that :)
Smile sometimes!
David Bowie himself was extremely impressed.
The Chicken Little Crowd weighs in.
The only thing that could destroy life as we know it is government.
ML/NJ
No matter what the former Canadian astronaut’s reasons are - I didn’t even read what they are - Mars should not be our next major off world exploration by living humans - robotic rovers, yes, humans no.
Our next major off world exploration by living humans should be a moon base.
It can be like a “boot camp” for how best to make a “human habitat” camp, off world, and how to make it work. There is all sorts of things that can get “field tested” on the moon.
Meanwhile, by continuing to use robotic rovers on mars we can add to what knowledge of Mars we have, which will make for better exploration of Mars by living humans when we are ready.
We can also begin building a space platform. It would fist be used as a travelers station for the trips back and forth to & from the moon. Reusable space vehicles for going back and forth to and from the moon would be docked there. Humans going to the moon would only need vehicles to get them to the space platform, not vehicles that would take them all the way to them moon. They would have their own “shuttle craft” for the moon landing & returning to the orbiting vehicle that took them to the moon; when it was time to return to the space platform orbiting earth. From the platform, they would take another kind of “shuttle” to return to earth.
It would be the “boot camp” for those things a space platform can do for us too.
Together the moon base experience and and space platform experience will prepare us for major explorations of Mars by living humans.
At some point it might be understood to work best constructing in earth orbit - in modules that get put together - the long range space vehicles, and as reusable vehicles. The heavy-lifting from earth’s surface (energy resource wise) would only be done in stages building the vehicles, and then not again. Leaving high earth orbit has a lower energy requirement, and doing so leaves a payload ability for the fuel-energy for the long distance travel.
We learn to walk before we learn to run.
There was a professor Frank Brown from Northwestern University who during the 1970’s wanted to send potatoes into space. He had previously observed that potatoes have metabolic rates that were in sync with the moon. If you moved potatoes from the east coast to the west coast those potatoes would retain the metabolic cycle for their old location and only gradually change to the new. Changes in latitude; changes in attitude.
It was his speculation that Humans were similarly in sync with the sun and moon and moving out of range of the moon may have profoundly negative effects on our bodies. Humans quite possibly will wither and die if moved too far from our homes. Dr. Hawking’s conclusions may be based on incomplete data...
There seems to be no shortage of AstroNuts ready to go....
Hell! We're not ready to live on this one if the reports are correct.
I suggest you watch “The Expanse” on Netflix. Going to Mars isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
But Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has previously said that humans just aren’t ready to live on other worlds.
...
I saw a Youtube of Hatfield giving a TED talk. Something isn’t right about him. He’s smart, but he looks mean, and he gave me that impression during the talk, too.
The people who master space travel will be the people our grandkids work for. I would like it to be our grandkids who master it.
And in that vein, I’d like to see a bit more urgency about space exploration. I thought when we landed on the moon that we’d be on Mars thirty years later; as it turns out we can’t even get back to the moon. There just isn’t much interest. When they killed the manned space program, it was because they thought we could better spend that money helping the poor. Five decades later we still have lots of poor, but no men beyond a hundred miles from the surface, and we have to pay the Russians even to get there.
Why would a Canadian astronaut’s opinion matter? I don’t think that Canada has ever built a rocket capable of going beyond the upper atmosphere of earth. They hitch rides on other rockets. Not that that’s a bad thing but it’s kind of like asking some guy who’s rode a taxi a couple if times what kind of developments are coming up for next years taxicabs. I would, however, value his opinion on hockey. For future rocketry plans, I’ll ask a rocket scientist.
Most Idiots think Mars is Hollywood’s 5 minutes away
Matt Damon proved it. But hey, let's keep sending Hollyweirdos there till we get it right. Please.
And in 1960 we weren’t ready for the moon. There’s only one way to get ready: have a goal.
We don’t even have the technology for the necessary radiation shielding. We are not going anywhere if we cannot protect from radiation caused cancer and genetic mutation of our sexual organs.
That would have been Nixon.
Kennedy was dead as a door nail by the time we got to the moon.
We weren’t ready for the moon when it was announced. Not even close.