If only he really were dismantling government beaurocracies...

Great reply (heh--I don't smoke anything).

I am talking about Mars from the standpoint of the science skeptic who would say, "What good does it do to go there?".  I watched four hours on the Martian rovers.  I think it is awesome  But those opposed to space "exploration" for pure science and see it as a waste can be given more "practical" things that they can see the benefit in.

I forget the name but a commercial space investment company a few years back had already raised $50 million and stated for another $100 million more they could do a core sample return from the asteroid belt--bring back three pounds of material.  Bill Gates could sneeze that out of his handkerchief. I liked the maverick guys at NASA who came out and publicly argued for a more cost effective lifter program and was on their side but the Constellation program is pretty much done.  A shame to just toss it all aside (who knows how they will manage it though).

A moon base provides experience for semi-permanent science bases on Mars--not just a one or two show "wonder trip" and it may end up being the ideal place to attempt the first space elevator or magnetic launcher train.  As we can now cook rocket fuel and oxygen out of lunar soil and found we could grow marigolds in the lunar dirt just by adding water and warmth having a supply source ina gravity well 1/6th the earth's is more than just 'going back to where we have already been".  We don't need just exploration now but development.

I am not a "Kennedy Fan" but I have immense respect for Jack Kennedy and his ambition to reach the moon.  The turmoil of the sixties, the Cold War, economic issues--and he proposeed this ludicrous idea with no apparent tangible payoff.  It united the entire nation and spawned a whole generation of indsutrial tech development in this country.

I understand the current practicalities and NASA will take hits like everyone but space should become the governments business--not just a science project.  As we pull back, China and India are planning whole new manned mission projects including lunar landings.  We have officials now sounding alarms that teh US isn't turning out engineers and scientests at a level that meets current need--much less any future growth.  We are regressing.  This isn't the time to cash in all the chips and walk away from the table--its time to wager and invest (imho).

Imagine if the WPA (Works Progress Administration)  during the Depression years had been the SPA (Space Progress Administration).  We could do that very thing now.  We can priint solar cells on mylar sheets from an inkjet now.  We've cut panel costs  exponentially with currrent tech and are producing panels that are 60% efficiency.  DoD and astronemers are already using lasers for directed beam and light re-focusing.  That and the heavy lifter were the only two major technological obstacles in 1998 when a study concluded for the DoD that solar space power was practical and that was even more affirmed in 2008.

We just burned through nearly three TRILLION dollars in less than a year on zip projects that did nothing but adapt our economy to a shrunken size, pad the banks loss sheets and pay for a majority of projects that would have been done anyway by the states.  This NASA cut is the first swing of Obama's axe toward controlling spending (haha--that's never gonna happen with him either).  But to PUBLICLY start with NASA is shameful (imho)

I'm not talking as a space enthusiast here (well not just as)--if the US does not create a new industry and run ahead of others in it, we have no where else to go.

Yes we can hope but I'd love to see a new Kennedy (hopefully an independent) stand up and say, "Space is crucial to our future".  It actually is.

If things keep going the way they are we'll all be speaking Mandarin soon. Unless they have better uses for us, like organ harvesting.

Nobody has explained why we need people to do these things.

Ok, you can write the code that makes fine adjustments during landing, the code that determines the quality of ore mined, the code that determines when to launch the craft that ships ore back to earth, and the code that prevents the ore return vehicle from burning up on re-entry. And thats just for mining operations, Manufacturing facilities would require even more code, to smelt ore down, form it into usable products, and manufacture additional return craft. People can be trained to do those things faster and cheaper than what it would take to write the code and perform sufficient missions to ensure that the code can perform the way it is supposed to.

Additionally, what do you propose the robots do if they manage to land but it is in a resource poor environment? If you havent programmed for that contingency, they'll just sit there doing nothing, whereas a human can make a decision on the fly to, cook fuel out of the soil/excess water from power cells, move to a different location, and try again.

What a godawful short-term point of view, and a gross underestimation of the state and pace of development of robotics and telepresence. That "measuring" you so blithely dismiss is indeed being done by 'robots' like the Mars Exploration Rovers, which are controlled by humans and have already illustrated the ability of unmanned missions to adapt to unexpected situations and implement new mission goals.

Don't get me wrong; astronauts are in general a 'hero' class to me. But they're just way too expensive to keep at the center of the effort when we are still so very, very far from having a space equivalent of even a 16th century galleon, much less a DC-10 jet liner. A few humans in orbit to run science labs that include themselves as guinea pigs is a reasonable investment in good economic times. But when money is tight, we'll do more for the long term by focusing on remote technologies. More both for the future of humanity in space and the needs of humanity on earth right now.

Either way, unless the government has secretly developed FTL communications, manned bases farther afield than Earth will become inevitable. Getting a head start on the experience needed to live long term(>2yrs) in a low gravity situation will mean we will be better prepared to man a Mars based rover mission on the Jovian moons and dwarf planets residing in the asteroid belt.

If Apollo 13 was unmanned, there wouldn't have been a problem to begin with.  That's sort of the problem with using people.

Coding an operating system from scratch, testing it, rewriting it, testing it again, it's a fraction of the cost of training people to do those jobs.  The operating cost of the training facilities alone blows it away.  Everything will be software operated to begin with.  All of the mining equipment will have to be automated, what you'll really need people for is maintenance.  That's close to obsolete as well.  An employee on the moon and an employee on the ground are two entirely different cost factors, the obscenely expensive robotics become a significantly cheaper variable once you add on a few hundred thousand miles  The robot actually has advantages up there, no atmosphere is a bonus instead of a hindrance.

two of those men went back to the moon, one of them walked on it.

very true

and the technologies developed from spaceflight are also now being used for war... which is a little ironic because it was technologies developed for war that gave rise to spaceflight in the first place.

thats one branch of the government I'd think would be very interested in space development, I'm sure they are funding their own secret space program right now. Air superiority is one thing,,,

If you can control space, you can de-orbit some tungsten rods on your enemies.  With a weapon like that, who needs nukes?