I am 68 years old. Before Sputnik went up I knew that people would go to the moon in my lifetime. A lot of people, inspired by science fiction, do not understand the magnitude of the difference between a moon mission and a Mars mission. The length of the mission alone means 150 times the cosmic ray exposure. The shielding alone would increase the weight of the capsule by orders of magnitude, even if we made the astronauts spend those two years in a ship as cramped as the moon astronauts endures for their 8-day voyage. Give them enough room to move around and sufficient shielding and you're probably talking a thousand times times the weight, or more. (Note that the ISS is within the Earth's magnetosphere, and thus protected from cosmic rays. The Apollo astronauts left the magnetosphere, but only for a few days, and they got significant levels of radiation. Send astronauts to Mars in the Apollo capsule and they'd be dead on arrival.)
With all that, I think we may send people to Mars, some day, maybe. But a self-sustaining colony on a planet with essentially no atmosphere, no magnetic field to shield from cosmic rays, and hardly any resources, I repeat, it's a pipe dream. The moon is really no more barren than Mars, and it's a lot closer, and we still have no colony there. We haven't even gone back since the end of the Apollo program.
Add to this that by the time we have the launch capacity to send the necessary supplies, robotics will have advanced to the point where the only reason to send humans will be for the "glory" of doing it. How many people here would be willing to pay an additional $25,000 a year in taxes, beyond what you're already paying, for the next decade, in order to pay for one manned mission to Mars and back, as the first step towards a colony in a hundred years? Because somebody's got to pay the astronomical cost, or it won't happen.
Yadda, yadda, yadda... I will reach 50 in July. I still think as I did when I was a 4-year-old. So there.
Things cost money and stuff. The U.S. spent billions to trillions during the Cold War. Then Peace Broke Out when Communism failed a good 15-to-20 years early in Russia, well ahead of schedule, without spawning the long planned for Global Thermonuclear War that was supposed to happen. That resulted in immediate calls on Capitol Hill to be
'fiscally responsible' by lowering military expenditures across the board, closing military bases, becoming more
'lean' as a fighting force and whatnot. Because obviously we had
'won', right? That couldn't be allowed. So during the George H. W. Bush Administration, it was determined that we desperately needed to use our huge stockpile of
'modern' weapons acquired during the decades long buildup of armaments to demonstrate our military might by
'Bombing Them Back into the Stone Age' and stuff. He got the excuse he wanted when Kuwait, a tiny country of barely 34% the area of San Bernardino County in California, begged for help against a big, bad, bully called Iraq
(a country that had been our... 'Friend' versus Iran for some time), he was all too happy to participate. And for some reason, the whole
'War is Good' crowd never seems to have any problem with such expenditures. War is a great excuse to spend money -- and for someone else to make money. And all the so-called
'aerospace' companies do nothing whatsoever regarding space, but spend all their dough creating weapons, many of which haven't worked very well since they accidentally created cruise missiles, which work FAR better than anyone expected. The way I see it, always finding a new
'enemy' to blow up cannot possibly work, because you will eventually subjugate everyone in what amounts to being Imperial Rule. But you know what? You aren't going to run out of outer space. There's plenty of it. It literally goes on for at least 42 Googol of any unit of measure you'd prefer to choose beyond what most people would call
'forever'. Thus, with so much space to conquer, you will never, ever,
EVER have to worry about it running out ahead of schedule, as happened with those friggin' pansy-arse REDS of the U.S.S.R. who threw up their hands and cried the Russian equivalent of
'¡No Mas!' («Нет больше!", maybe?) in such an unmanly fashion. It is such an obvious thing to do, spending boundless amounts of money to explore unlimited space throughout all eternity, that I wondered why it wasn't being done. Y'know, instead of blowing up brown people.
My theory is that at some point during the Nixon Administration aliens landed on the White House lawn. They informed the President that they didn't want monkey boys like us outside of close orbit anymore. He agreed, and the Apollo program was cancelled. Shortly after, President Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace
(after learning Marijuana cured Cancer), so Gerald R. Ford, Jr
(born 54 years before me, to the day) took the position of President. When President Ford kept bumping his head, he apparently forgot the briefing about the aliens and didn't pass that information on to the President Elect, James E. Carter, in 1976. So the aliens, bored, and growing impatient, knocked Skylab out of orbit in frustration a few years later. Stupid humans here on Earth still didn't get the hint, so they started sending manned missions to low orbit in Space Shuttles, supposedly to be used to build larger platforms in orbit, to be used for future missions to the Moon, and later, Mars. Then, just as I was beginning my second semester in college, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff.
The aliens once again landed on the White House lawn, only to find a septuagenarian living there, who immediately told them to,
"Go ahead, make my day!" while wielding a .44 MAGNUM with intent. The aliens were flummoxed, noted that it wasn't them, they didn't do it, but that they had warned Humans of the dangers of space travel using the archaic Terran technology we had available. They kindly suggested we take it slower from now on. So the administrative anchor was cast out and dragged NASA to an absolute dead stop halt. It was something like five years straight that most shuttle flights were classified Department of Defense missions, and the vessels were renamed as
'Orbiters' instead. Also, instead of flying with the bay doors, covered with solar panels, open to the Sun as they had been before, all their missions were conducted while flying inverted from that point forward. Which was mighty weird. Maybe the aliens didn't want anyone looking at them any more? I guess that's why the Hubble Space Telescope was...
~*ahem*~ rendered
'faulty' at first. Bottom line, we are in quarantine, and aren't allowed to leave this place until our probation is over. Yeah.
But hey, I could be wrong.
