Try 30 years ago when Viking 2 landed on Mars in 1976. KingCheetah stated some reasons why they did it differently last time. The moon is a lot closer than Mars. Sending men there would be a huge, complex undertaking with countless variables. Here is a good read about the history of NASA's exploration decision making: FIRST PHASE OF LUNAR EXPLORATION COMPLETED: Personnel and Program Changes The last months of 1969 brought changes in several key offices in NASA Headquarters and the centers. Thomas O. Paine, who had succeeded James Webb as NASA administrator less than a year earlier, called George M. Low to Headquarters to become deputy administrator, the agency's second-ranking official.* After guiding Apollo through its most difficult years and at long last establishing the first post-Apollo project (Skylab), George Mueller announced his intent to resign as Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight at the end of the year. The Air Force reassigned Lt. Gen. Sam Phillips, longtime manager of the Apollo Program Office under Mueller, to command its Space and Missile Systems Organization. As Mueller's replacement Paine named Dale D . Myers, Apollo spacecraft manager at North American Rockwell for many years; Phillips's place was filled by Rocco A. Petrone, director of launch operations at Kennedy Space Center. At Houston, Gilruth appointed Col. James A. McDivitt, command pilot on Gemini IV and commander of Apollo 9, to head the Apollo spacecraft project office and Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., MSC's director of flight operations, to be deputy center director.65 MSC also had a new Director of Science and Applications, Anthony J. Calio, who succeeded Wilmot Hess after Hess's resignation in the fall [see Chapter 10]. New managers faced new problems in the year following Apollo 11's resounding success. Public enthusiasm for lunar missions waned when, with Apollo 12, they began to seem routine. Funding prospects were also bleak. Lyndon Johnson's last budget submittal (in January 1969) requested $3.878 billion for NASA,66 nearly 25 percent lower than the budget for the peak year, fiscal 1965. When Richard Nixon's first budget was submitted in April, that figure was reduced to $3.833 billion. Paine put the best face he could on the situation; the reductions would require "difficult program adjustments," but in the context of the administration's determination to reduce government spending, "the nation can continue a scientifically effective program of manned lunar exploration" and the capability to produce Saturn V boosters would not lapse beyond recovery.67 When the space agency's appropriation bill was signed in November, it provided only $3.697 billion, and the adjustments became even more difficult.68 Besides being economy minded, the new administration was in no hurry to establish a position on space. Early in 1969 the new President appointed a Space Task Group** to study the space program, calling for a report in six months on alternatives for the post-Apollo period. Predictably, the group's report, submitted on September 15, recommended a balanced program of manned and unmanned space activity. Its most radical suggestion was that NASA should adopt a new long-range goal, comparable to the Apollo goal that had sustained space exploration for eight years, to provide the impetus for new developments. For that goal they suggested manned exploration of the planets, specifically a manned landing on Mars by the end of the 20th century. Three options were proposed: an all-out effort, including a 50-man earth-orbiting space station and a lunar base, culminating with the Mars landing in the mid-1980s; a less ambitious program providing for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the manned mission; and a minimum program that would develop a space station and a shuttle vehicle but would defer the Mars landing to some unspecified time before the end of the century. Costs were estimated at between $8 billion and $10 billion per year by 1980 for the most ambitious option and from $4 billion to $5.7 billion annually by 1976 for the least.69 Nixon's reaction to the Space Task Group report was not immediately forthcoming. His press secretary declined to predict when the President would make a decision, but said that competing domestic programs and the constraints imposed by inflation would certainly have to be considered in funding any new space ventures.70 Public reaction to the proposal of a manned flight to Mars was generally negative. The Washington Post suggested that such a trip should be weighed carefully in terms of its potential scientific value: "It is knowledge we seek, not spectaculars. . . . "71 A point of view shared by many scientists was expressed at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in December by Gordon J. F. MacDonald, who characterized it as "the utmost folly." Retiring AAAS president Waiter Orr Roberts said that the United States should not set a goal of sending men to Mars "now or ever."72 Even congressional supporters of manned space flight found the proposal unacceptable. The chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee told the House that he was unwilling to commit the nation to any specific timetable for sending men to Mars, and the chairman of the Manned Space Flight subcommittee likewise shied away from an endorsement.73 Perhaps the thumbs-down reaction to a Mars flight was to be expected, given the projected cost of such a program, which the Space Task Group estimated at $54:1 billion to $78.2 billion during the 1970-1980 decade. Somewhat surprising was that even Apollo, hitherto all but inviolable, was not to escape the effects of NASA's straitening circumstances. On January 4, 1970, following dedication of the Lunar Science Institute at Houston, deputy administrator George Low announced that Apollo 20 had been canceled and the schedule for the seven remaining flights would be stretched out into 1974. Four would be flown in 1970-1971 at intervals depending on the choice of sites. Lunar exploration would then be interrupted while the three-mission Apollo Applications Program (a rudimentary space station in earth orbit, soon to be renamed "Skylab") was conducted. The last three missions to the moon would be flown in 1973 and 1974. Low denied reports that NASA planned to cancel four Apollo flights, saying that such action would "do away with most of our scientific return and waste the investment we have made." Lunar scientists were reported to have been pleased by Low's announcement;74 they had evidently feared that even more missions would be deleted. Ten days later, after preliminary discussions on the fiscal 1971 budget, administrator Thomas O. Paine revealed more changes in space exploration. Saturn V launch vehicle production was to be suspended indefinitely after the fifteenth booster was completed, leaving NASA with no means of putting really large payloads into earth orbit or continuing lunar exploration. The last Saturn V was reassigned from Apollo 20 to Skylab. Unmanned explorations of Mercury and Mars were reduced or deferred. Some 50,000 of the estimated 190,000 employees of NASA and its contractors would have to be laid off, and many university scientists would find their projects without funds. Though the new plans imposed real austerity, Paine noted that they did provide for a start on the next project, development of a reusable spacecraft to shuttle crews and payloads between earth and a space station in earth orbit.75 Apollo still had supporters in Congress, however, and they tried their best to add $130.5 million to the administration's budget for lunar exploration in fiscal 1971. But the Senate would not go along, and after a vigorous debate, the conference committee reported an authorization bill containing an increase of only $38 million for Apollo.76 After the first two lunar landings, Congress and the nation were ready to get on to other things - but nothing so expensive as a flight to Mars. A congressional historian who served on the House space committee described the dawn of the 1970s as "the worst of times for the space program," and then summarized the budget debates: By hindsight, it seems unlikely that even the strongest and most adept mobilization of the supporters of more manned flights to the Moon could have successfully overcome the adverse feeling in the country in the early 1970's. Congress and the Nation could be persuaded to support Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and a modest level of activity by NASA in many other areas. But . . . Von Braun's dream of a manned flight to Mars was not in the cards for the 20th century, at least.77 http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4214/ch11-6.html And remember the public was actually getting bored with going to the moon. Television networks cancelled live coverage after Apollo 12. Here is good reading on the Apollo missions. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A429031 NASA just wanted a reusable spacecraft to cut down on costs, and ended up focusing on the shuttle too long imo. They thought turn around time on luanches were going to be a lot less too and they would be more of them. Plus they had the obvious setbacks. Oh well, it's still pretty freakin cool.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-02-20-mars-rover_x.htm Ok, not microbes, but "threadlike" features. You get my point about the pollution I hope.
The physical properties required of the material used to build a space elevator are obscene, bordering on absurd and exceed the specifications of any building material available. Only in the past 10 or so years have they been able to come up with a theoretical idea of what the material could be made of. Traveling to the moon is the equivalent of sailing across the English Channel, while getting to Mars is like sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. How many hundreds of years were people crossing the English Channel before they got to North America? The radio delay for communicating with an automated vehicle on Mars makes it impossible to make corrections in real-time and there is still no practical way to send people to Mars that doesn't involve them dying of cancers caused by cosmic rays on route. You apparently have no idea of how difficult the practical engineering for even getting to the moon really is.
Well we all know that the spacecraft that you built and flew to Mars is far superior, but you don't fave to rub it in our faces.
We've already had a couple of people prove that someone they know worked on it, but I'll add one. My dad was on the engineering team that did the calculations for the moon landing. These people weren't hired, or doing all that work, for nothing. (not to mention the moon rocks that my ex and others have analyzed in geology laboratories. If they weren't actual samples, they would not spend so much time and research money on them.)
we do not have materials capable of blocking cosmic Rays? [sounds like a cheesy statement from the fantastic four when you say it out loud] but I'm serious Rocket River
you mean . .our government would never spend alot of money for nothing more than a smoke screen to divert people's attention? Rocket River I think our government is *capable* of worse. . . . not saying they did it.
I used to take foreign students at a major Houston university to NASA, when they first arrived in Houston, as a favor to a faculty member. This was back in the early '70's, while the Apollo program was still in full swing. Because of who the faculty member was, we were given private tours to parts where the general public rarely went in those days, if at all. If Apollo was a hoax, it was the most elaborate and expensive hoax in history. It wasn't a hoax. Why did we do "nothing" in following it up? The original drive behind going to the Moon was political. Once the political objective was met, the urgency and the budget were diminished. As a big fan of space exploration, as well as a voracious SF reader, I was, and am, bitterly disappointed that we "quit" when we did. In my opinion, it is a mistake we are still paying for. Had we continued refining the technology we so brilliantly developed, instead of going for a pie-in-the-sky shuttle program far too complex, expensive, and unnecessary at the time (and woefully obsolete today), we could have had space stations and Lunar bases for years. We blew it.
If the Soviets had the slightest shred of evidence that we had faked the landing, they would have called our bluff.
Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. How many years before the Jamestown colony was established? How about 1607. That is 115 years between discovery and colonization. Humans have been to the moon so the trip has been done a couple times for the sake of making the trip. Now what? What is the point of spending the money to go back? The only reason to go to Mars is to say humans have been there. I don't see it becoming like the suburbs of Las Vegas anytime soon.
There's supposedly trillions of dollars worth of minerals and resources in that asteroid belt between Earth and Mars. That's the reason to go.
While that's true, and the Belt will be a major focus as we expand throughout the Solar System over the next couple of hundred years, for just that reason (you can cherry-pick a rock that has what you want, and the uses are pretty endless. they've moveable, and could be placed in orbit around a colony, or the Earth, deficient in the minerals said rock would contain, where they could be processed and used), that's not "the reason to go," in my opinion. Why go? We need to have a major presence in space in order to protect the Earth, and humanity, from a civilization-killing (and possibly humanity-killing) asteroid or comet strike on our planet. Right now, unless we had at least a decade of lead-time before a strike, or longer, we could do nothing. We'd have to wait for catastrophe, kiss the wife and kids goodbye, and hope for luck. The Bruce Willis movie was a Hollywood fantasy. The second reason is to get humanity off this planet, so in case Terra is hit by the above scenario, despite our best efforts, the human race would live on. For those skeptics who think this couldn't happen to Earth and mankind, it has happened before. Not only has it happened before, but we don't even discover some asteroid near-misses until they've already zipped by at tens of thousands of miles per hour. We've have some pass as close as between the orbit of the Moon and Earth, only to be discovered after the fact. We don't have near the capabilities to deal with this as the general public thinks. (thanks, Hollywood!) For me, exploring our Solar System, and hopefully beyond, is plenty reason enough. It's our destiny, in my opinion. It's just not the most immediate reason. The immediate reason is to develop an ability to protect our planet.
Well, we are all going to die, someday. Let's just make sure it isn't from a giant rock, or hunk of ice!
I don't think you're comprehending the whole picture here. The moon orbits Earth. It's much easier for us to tell where it's going to be, seeing as how it never drifts away from us. On average, it's about a 240,000 mile flight. Mars goes around the sun in its own orbit, at its own velocity. The closest it EVER gets to earth is around 35 million miles...145 times further. At its furthest, Mars is 250 million miles away. It's significantly more difficult to time a landing onto a separate orbiting body like that It certainly will take one hell of a lot more fuel, and money to successfully get a team of astronauts there. Moreover, the flight itself will take months or even a year depending on the initial position of the two planets at launch. 40 years of advances are hardly enough if you ask me.
