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Warning: Lengthy spiel follows.

A manned mission to Mars is nonsensical. I worked at NASA during Dan Goldin's reign there.

At one point he made an impassioned appeal for the vision of a manned mission to Mars as if it were the next logical step in man fullfilling his destiny of inhabiting space. But Mars is a dead end. I owe my perspective on this to the excellent writing of Larry Niven. Check out story "Into a Hole"

Interplanetary space, with it's unlimited hard vacuum and microgravity environment is what we should be trying to get access to.

We build large, expensive, and dangerous machines just to get away from the Earths gravity well. Is it a reasonable goal to want to decend into another hole that we will have to climb back out of again?

If Mars was made of emeralds it would be too expensive to retreive them to make the trip practical If you want scientific knowledge, unmanned probes could get more of it for way less money, recent probe failures notwithstanding.

There would be a symbolic purpose in men leaving footprints on a another world but I have a feeling that it wouldn't seem as significant as the Lunar landings were 40 years ago.

Mars isn't the stepping stone to the stars. It's a dead end project that has captured a lot of people's imaginations. When Goldin and Sagan made their pitches Goldin likened a manned mission to Mars as part of Man's biological imperative to explore and expand. Sagan hoped that we would find life or the remains of life there and vindicate his worldview. Goldin asked, "Where would we be if the explorers didn't wonder what was over the next horizon?" "Where would we be if the settlers hadn't risked long journeys in Connestoga wagons to explore the American Frontier?"

He ignored an obvious difference. The explorers and settlers were looking for profit. Either treasure or a better life for their families. Mars doesn't offer any profit at all. But space does.

If humans are destined to have a significant presence in space, that presence will NOT be launched from Mars. It will probably not be launched from the Earth either.

Lets assume that force fields and warp drives will defy being invented in our lifetimes. How then will we get a lot of space ships built and underway? Launching anything into orbit is expensive. We have to build powerful rockets that have to be made even more powerful to lift the fuel to lift the fuel...

These rockets are so dangerous that it takes an army of engineers and technicians on hand to carefully prepare the rocket for launch so it doesn't blow up on the pad.

What if the rockets were built from material that is already in orbit though? If a spacecraft never has to climb thhrough a thick atmosphere while achieving orbit then the need for large, expensive and dangerous engines is eliminated. A Spacecraft could travel anywhere with a low thrust engine and longer burn times. The bulk of a rockets mass is consumed just getting the payload above the atmosphere. Eliminate the need for that and payload goes up.

The stepping stones to the stars are the asteroid belts. In the belt you have an entire planet's worth of raw materials pre mined and sorted into piles. Imagine dispatching some robotic tug ships to move a 20 km diameter hunk of properly compositioned rock to low Earth orbit. Even if it takes decades to get it to Earth it would be worth it. An asteroid in earth orbit would provide the raw material for the waves of humanity's expansion. That is the next logical step. A manned mission to Mars would delay rather than further the colonization of Space.

Good post. Is this the same Larry Niven who wrote Ringworld? Brilliant book. I must've sat for hours and hours pondering the Ringworld he thought up.

He's dead on economically here. It would be dead cheap (comparatively) to just lug some asteroids slowly back to Earth orbit. Hey who knows, in a few decades (the time it might take perhaps to tug them back from the asteroid belt) we might not even be tempted to drop one on the Middle East.

On a side note, $20 Billion doesn't sound like as much money as it did a few years ago does it? You'd think the Russians are having some success with their Space Tourism thing- they could find enough techie billionaires to cough up a few billion a piece and just fund the whole thing privately. I don't know what the financial incentive for them to do so would be other than simply having the mission associated with their names and corporations. But there are plenty of super rich people and you never know till you ask.

I agree with what you've said. The #1 goal we should be moving towards is a way to defeat gravity. As long as we have to fight so hard to get out of Earth's gravity well, and not to mention the effects of low gravity on humans, we will be doomed to a small, insigificant presence in Space.

That's not to say that we shouldn't develop the engineering side to be able to live more and more comfortably in Space, and to get around in Space, but without learning to offset gravity, the effort of just reaching Space will always be prohibitive.

The #2 goal should be developing engines or other means of propulsion capable of making at least intersystem travel more realistic in terms of duration. We can't take years to get to the outer planets if we are to be able to utilize them in any profitable manner. Months to a year, to reach most of the planets, seems to be the minimum for serious colonization/utilization of system-wide objects.

I don't think NASA is what will propel us to these ends. I think that private companies need to find a means of profit in Space, which would make them much more apt to devote the time and research to develop technologies that would enable increasingly useful/efficient means of space travel. To really make use of Space, we need to get a lot more people out there living in it, experiencing it, learning the various things that can go wrong out there and ways of coping with those dangers.

All that said, I don't think we'll be going to Mars any time soon. There are too many political considerations in no investing the time or money, or allowing corperations to do so, to make a trip to Mars or anywhere else outside of Earth's orbit a likely possibility, at least that's my opinion.

Tuor

A manned mission to Mars is nonsensical. I worked at NASA during Dan Goldin's reign there. I owe my perspective on this to the excellent writing of Larry Niven. Check out story "Into a Hole"

You worked at NASA and don't understand what overcoming the challenges of a man mission to Mars would mean? Wow. First, the man mission to the moon was a complete waste too. But, look what huddles were crossed in the in the attempt. Understanding of the mechanics of spacewalks (took five attempts and almost killed the first walker), long-term space records (we actually thought that exposure over two weeks would kill), docking procedures (it was impossible to dock two spacecraft), creation of effective spacesuits, vast improvements in rocket design, geez the list goes on and on. The useless moonwalk project was a unbelieveable boon to spaceflight. Heck, it even gave us Tang, actually the crossover technologies gained from the useless man mission was worth the cost tenfold.

What pencil neck geeks fail to understand is America's need for a bold project to unite us! Not everything as in life is black and white, balance sheets. The nation was united behind the moon project and what is missing in America now is a sense of national purpose. Technological advancements will come: Life support, health maintenance, propulsion, aerobraking, radiation protection and plantary transportation. Plus, ideas and technologies not even in conception now.

So, basically I think you and Larry are wrong!