[ALOHA RONNIE]

...and now

...on to MARS.

http://www.TheAlamoFILM.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=11163

[Carolinamom]

I never miss a Charles Krauthammer column. Thanks for posting it.

[bc2]

PRIVATIZE THE SPACE INDUSTRY NOW!

firstly, space exploration is not a legitimate function of government. secondly, it is far less efficient for this to be run by the government then by private industry.

[Atlas Sneezed]

How about the government offers a $10 billion prize for the first Mars rocks returned to earth?

Let private industry handle the rest, with low cost leases of NASA facilities.

[Jim Noble]

Do you think the sheeple will mind very much that the first transmissions from Mars Base 1 are going to be in Chinese?

[Anticommie]

Then, astonishingly, it took only 66 to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon. And then, still more astonishingly, we lost interest, spending the remaining 30 years of the 20th century going around in circles in low earth orbit, i.e., going nowhere.

Amazing but true statement, I am afraid tough it may take another space race to get us to Mars, if there was not for Soviet Union, we would never be on the moon, but there is no competitor now so nobody but dreamers give a damn about Mars.

[tet68]

Bump.

I'm ready, send me.

Blacksmiths in Spaaaaaaaaace!

[LibKill]

Can I go too? Pretty please?

Even if I can't personally go, humans should go to Mars. It's the kind of thing we do.

[Brett66]

Going to Mars would be cool and all that, but what do we do after we go there? We didn't have an answer to this question after Apollo. The same thing will happen again. We need an economical exploration infrastructure to make routine human planetary exploration possible, flags and footprints aren't going to cut it.

[Theophilus]

If the Moon were made of gold {or name your exotic element/material: platinum, plutonium, diamonds...}, it would not be worth the cost of traveling to get to it. The Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, The Galilean Satellites are all rocks - nothing but rocks. Columbus did not sail to a new world made of nothing but rock, containing nothing but rock, across a desert ocean of acid, poison, lava, withering radiation, insanely hot magnetic belts and not to mention a freakish vacuum in massive ships made of gold paddled tediously with oars of diamonds the size of popsicle sticks.

[ALOHA RONNIE]

.


NASA's Griffin says China may reach Moon before US

http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1802454/posts

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[Fitzcarraldo]

IMO let's not waste much time or $$$ on the Moon - the arguments that it is essential for defense, or is a particularly important industrial site are flawed. It has not been proven that sufficient water ice (if any) is there to sustain a rocket refueling station for very long. Mars is a suitable target because of its atmosphere, water ice and rich geology of great interest to an important scientific lobby - the biological sciences.