Posted on 12/26/2018 11:34:23 AM PST by jazusamo
Sending astronauts to Mars would be stupid, says ApolOne of the first astronauts to orbit the Moon said on Wednesday that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars.
Bill Anders, who was the lunar module pilot for NASA's Apollo 8 mission, told BBC Radio 5 Live that sending crews to the Red Planet would be "almost ridiculous."
The U.S. space agency's goals include sending humans to Mars for exploration and scientific study.
"What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" Anders, 85, said, adding: "I don't think the public is that interested."
Still, the retired astronaut did explain that he's a big supporter of NASA's unmanned programs to Mars — "mainly because they're much cheaper."
NASA's InSight Mars Lander, which reached the Red Planet in late November, has been listening for "marsquakes," has 'heard' Martian winds and has beamed back a range of awesome images.
In a statement, NASA told the BBC that it was "leading a sustainable return to the Moon, which will help prepare us to send astronauts to Mars."
"That also includes commercial and international partners to expand human presence in space and bring back new knowledge and opportunities," the statement said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
This man is astronaut is awful short-sighted, and the irony is palpable.
All of the ancillary technologies we spun from the moon landing effort have paid for the initial expenditure many, many times.
LONG DISTANCE space travel and LONG TERM habitation of a planet (not a satellite) would reap similar advances.
What this idiot-astronaut is missing is that PEOPLE DO CARE about whether we could travel to and live on another planet. If it happened, it would be televised everywhere, ESPECIALLY if it were a race for such an achievement between China and the US.
It was the COMPETITION and the deadline imposed by Kennedy that rendered the magic.
Of all the people to say such things, you’d think it wouldn’t be an astronaut. I initially wondered who this guy was; wondered why I’d never heard of him. Those questions were answered.
Bill Anders was the LM pilot on the Apollo mission that didn’t actually have a lunar lander. Tourist. (Sarcasm)
Hey, living on Mars will improve your golf game ...
>> Bill Anders, who was the lunar module pilot for NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, told BBC Radio 5 Live that sending crews to the Red Planet would be “almost ridiculous.” <<
It’d be just as stupid as sending men to the moon.
“Bill Anders was the LM pilot on the Apollo mission that didn’t actually have a lunar lander. Tourist. (Sarcasm)”
Passenger...
But Apollo 8 was a ballsy mission without a backup LEM engine to escape the luner gravitational pull, in case the service module engine failed to ignite.
I agree with him, only insofar as the timing is concerned. Our technology is nowhere near advanced enough to attempt to put humans on Mars.
We need to cut our teeth on building and maintaining lunar bases before we reach out further.
Yeah, I take nothing away from those guys. Apollo 7 had a lot of problems between Wally Sciarra and mission control owing, I think, to Wally’s lack of faith in the Apollo spacecraft. The LM is way behind schedule putting the targeted landing in 1969 in jeopardy. So here you take a still unproven command & service module & launch it around the moon? Big brass ones in mission planning!
Yes... It is disgraceful for him to say this. Senility.
Well said in my view.
It’ll take many decades and trillions of dollars spent for effective travel and colonization technology to colonize Mars.
at the end of the apollo missions i recall that the scientific and engineering consensus was that progress in outer space was better made by robots than humans. i am not certain that anything about that has fundamentally changed in the intervening years. i think what might have changed is the subjective nostalgia and collective desire for resumption of manned interplanetary flight. certainly incremental technological advances have been made since the early 1970s. the incremental advances place the prospect of manned space flight to other planets in a more tempting light now.
how about hydrogen/water plasma rockets and robot mining of ice on ceres to send large amounts of water from ceres to low earth orbit? then use the water for fuel for similar rockets from there outwards for exploration.
If we cannot make it in Antarctica, we dang sure cannot make it on Mars...
Then air-conditioning was invented.
Now Florida is the third most populous state in the nation and still rising fast.
There is plenty of water on Mars. There was an article last week about a huge crater full of ice many miles deep, with snow around the crater rim. The water is there for the taking.
Bigger problem is the atmosphere, toxic to humans and non-breathable. And the lack of food, and the challenges of trying to grow anything in that sterile toxic atmosphere.
The more we look at Mars, the more water we find. It’s just not splashing around on the surface. There is certainly no shortage...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars#Subglacial_liquid_water
Water along with hydrocarbons are among the basic building blocks of the universe. It’s everywhere.
Left-winger much?
So, there are no homeless, sick or hungry worthy of compassion? And to have compassion for them is left wing? I don't think so. Our compassion is not the phony compassion of the left, that's the difference.
The millions of homeless sick and hungry are not in this country, and are unlikely to be helped much by money not spent on the space program.
The most useful benefits of the space program is not the exploration itself, but the innovation and accelerated tech developments it required, and enables more productivity and a higher standard of living, more than gov. foreign aid is likely to effect. . Most of which we are ignorant of and provide .
And with adversaries as Russia and China, if these tech developments are not continued and accelerated then can will cost America greatly.
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