[deoetdoctrinae]

OK, I'll be the first. "We can put an SUV sized explorer on Mars, but we can't cure the common cold." ☺

This is quite the technological achievement, and hopefully we will get some great results.

[waxer1]

2 billion on this what is the point of all of this?

[Sacajaweau]

My favorite has always been....it took 200 years to invent “sticky postal stamps”.

[bert]

-——we can’t cure the common cold-——

large doses of vitimin D3 and zinc like ziacam do the trick nicely

[stuartcr]

...or any number of diseases, affordable healthcare, inexpensive fuel, etc

[dfwgator]

"We can put an SUV sized explorer on Mars, but we can't cure the common cold." ☺

But Whitey's on Mars.

[tom h]

"We can put an SUV sized explorer on Mars, but we can't cure the common cold"

Why? Because Mars is basically immutable -- stable orbit, predicable climate, exact measurements of gravity, a well-known map, while the virus causing the common cold mutates constantly. If the virus was stable it would have been cured decades ago.

If those Mars physical features mutated as rapidly as the cold virus then one year it would look like today's Mars, the next year like Jupiter, the next year like the moon. The new features would not be predictable and, because it takes a rocket almost one year to travel from Earth to Mars, there is definitely NO WAY one could design a rocket to address all possibilities of orbit, gravity, atmosphere, etc.

Incidentally, I betcha that more money is spent each year trying to cure the common cold than was spent on the Mars mission anyway.