Communication between NASA and the rovers only requires 10 minutes...where'd you come up with the "days, months, and years" ????
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Going to Mars is good showy public relations chatter to impress halfwits, but it is, in fact, a bust. It is so cold there that there are carbon dioxide, dry ice, storms. It's a useless death trap. As long as I'm not one of the people chosen to go there, I don't care.
The nearest star is Alpha Centauri, if I remember correctly. It might have livable and productive planets similar to earth. It would be a potentially worthwhile trip. However, at 4 1/2 light years away it would require most of an adult lifetime to get there traveling 10,000 miles a second. If you hit a piece of space debris the suze of a pea at that speed, it would go through the space ship like a nuclear explosion.
It's one thing to be a man of vision and to talk about space travel. It's a far different to be a man of ignorant fantasy and hallucination. George Bush should have taken a course in Physics instead of guts courses.