Official NASA Mars job posters. - These kick arse.
- Thread starter Ravenor
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Sustained Denial of Service attacks. Paid for botnet. Service will continue to be disrupted until I can contact other providers and arrange a fix.
TBH I could see Mars not being a national endevor, even for dick swinging reasons.
I could easily see SpaceX or alike saying nha fuck this we are going there.
The last Moon landings were in the early 1970s. Mars anytime soon seems doubtful.
There's no point landing on the Moon though. It has nothing you can't dig out of the ground here and is completely uninhabitable. Mars has a lot of locations that are only marginally worse than the worst places on Earth. If you could actually get people there, it would only be slightly more complicated than keeping our Antarctica bases operating.
At the time it was done, establishing colonies in the United States was as much of a logistical nightmare and in fact some of those ceased to exist (Roanoke).
It's actually not that fantastic a concept.
The moon does have some natural resources, it's easier to launch spacecraft from due to the lack of an atmosphere and less gravity, and crops may even be grown in lunar soil. Although I can see why Mars is a more attractive destination -- especially with its' roughly 24-hour day.
Like what? It basically split off from the Earth anyway (maybe) so it's the exact crap we already have here minus the interesting organics. Or possibly it's some other piece of dumb shit from the solar system in general, but similarly, has no really interesting properties, at least from the actually living on it or mining it (with something other than robots) perspective.
So yeah, go up there, maybe, play a round of golf, plant a flag on it, then what?
Like the other guy said, it's much easier to land or launch a payload on the moon than it is to do it from Earth. Weight is the single most important consideration in current spaceflight. To even land on the Moon in the first place we needed 6.5 million pounds of Saturn V rocket and fuel to send 100,000 pounds of lunar module to the Moon. Every pound of material you get from the Moon into space is far more efficient then any you'd get from the Earth into space.
Considering you still have to get whatever machinery is extracting this stuff to the Moon in the first place, you have to be doing a hell of a lot of it before it becomes remotely efficient.
