Ummm, because its there?
"I don't think the public is that interested."
Maybe, but Anders doesn't speak for me. I'm always interested in stuff like this.
Its curious how Anders has lost his explorer's mentality.
It will take a geologist with a hand lens to determine if there has ever been any life there.
I suspect there has, but the biological imperative drives our collective need to know, one way or another.
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, 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.
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.
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.
Then air-conditioning was invented.
Now Florida is the third most populous state in the nation and still rising fast.