Will man ever walk on Mars?

Pump Up the Volume!

 

We need better methods of shielding astronauts from longterm radiation exposure. Until that happens, no way.

 

Watch "Moonshot" (the TBS(?) documentary based on the book by Alan Shepherd, Deke Slayton et al.). There's a scene in there of some man-on-the-street interview in which a mid-20s African-American man questions the NASA-related expenditures in light of the country's social problems at the time. That kind of thinking was already widespread within a few months of the Apollo 11 triumph.

 

Nope. This country isn't committed to any high ideals, other than "what can we do to beat the other party?"

 

Maybe if China becomes a bigger perceived threat and pumps its space program to going-to-Mars levels -- which seems to be on the horizon (it has a stated goal of a manned mission to the moon) -- it will get the U.S. moving. Other than that, I don't see it in the foreseeable future.

 

China is notoriously lousy at developing its own technology, but excellent at reverse-engineering (i.e. copying) others' like ours and the former Soviets'.

I actually think India will eventually be the more serious near-space rival, but Mars will end up being a joint U.S.-Russian-European project.

 

One of my fave Ozzy bands weighs in...

 

India might be a more serious space rival, but it is not considered a threat by the public (and more important, by politicians) the way China is (dang Common-ists). To get us going we need a Soviet-type we-need-to-beat-them-before-they-get-us kind of rival.

 

And we also may need to resolve our debt crisis.

Which is the other factor folks here are largely ignoring--there's a rather a monstrous difference in the fiscal state of our government between then and now. Quite a bit easier to sell the idea of chasing the moon and stars back in the 50s and 60s when we balanced our budgets and had the extra bucks to spend.

And another problem with the USSR/China comparison is that it's simply a different type of rivalry. The Cold War USSR rivalry was first and foremost an arms race, and there was a perception back then that conquering space was collaterally related to the arms race, and dire consequences could eventually result from falling behind.

But the China thing is perceived firstly as an economic rivalry, rather than an arms or military one. And, in an economic rivalry, there's not nearly the appeal for an endeavor that could cost an unfathomable amount of public money and would be unlikely to accomplish anything other than to say we did it.

 

According to Wiki, which is never ever wrong, the total budget of NASA in 2011 was about $18 billion. The Army budget was $244.9 billion. Total military spending is $683 billion. A bunch of that - around $50 billion - seems to be going toward new ships and Air Force projects, expensive stuff that we already lap the rest of the world in when it comes to technology. It would be nice (at least IMO) if we could re-make some of those military installations into space exploration facilities or production wings, so you wouldn't have to deal with the political fallout from shutting down the shipyard and losing jobs.

To me, the bigger danger and something we don't spend nearly enough on is defending the Earth from all the asteroids floating out there: http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/08/opinion/urry-asteroid-earth-risk/index.html - It would be nice if some sort of coalition focused a ton of money on monitoring as much of the space near the Earth as possible, and had counters at the ready, as opposed to waiting for a problem to develop and then just winging it at the time.

 

They figured all that out in 1998.