Quote:
Originally Posted by GrampianStars
MARS = 10-20 years 
it will take that long to develop a strategy for a LUNAR base station 
so all the technologies can be tested and verified before a Mars mission. |
Why not....all it takes is a little bit of political will. They've had 40 years worth of technical development since Apollo. How long spent studying the effects of long term spaceflight...nearly as long. They have the necessary technologies, what they don't have is the money or the political will...maybe even the public interest to go there.
At their present rate of stuffing around, it'll be another 50 years before they even think of going there, and given their propensity for faulty engineering, they'll have bigger and better things which won't work properly. What the hell, they're even considering putting back a decade or so, of going back to the Moon!!!. It's only right that they plan carefully and such, but there is a case of doing too much planning. Being overly pedantic and into too much detail. That's when big mistakes are made, and you lose lives. People start to second guess themselves and that's where the errors creep in.
Plan carefully once, do the job right in the first place and then do it. You can't plan for every little contingency or possibility, and that's what they're trying to do. That's where they'll stuff up, majorly.
The main reason why Apollo was canned for the last 3 flights wasn't that they didn't want to risk astronaut's lives on further missions. It was the fact that people got bored with it, and the pollies didn't want to spend the money (they had a war on, you know...greasing the palms of big business and breaking into rival's offices). Nixon lost the plot and lobby groups within NASA wanted to move onto building the Shuttle. They lost all the momentum they had built up over the years, and also lost a great opportunity. They'd have been on the Moon permanently by now, and would've had better technology for it. Now, they can't even get manufacturing their rockets right!!!. Look at all the trouble they're having with the Ares. I certainly wouldn't want to go up in one and at present that's precisely what would happen (you'd "go up"). They're trying to do too much with not enough money or resources and trying to get away with "under-engineering" things but having them adequate enough to do the job. It's not working and it never has worked in the past. Won't work in the future, either.
The way things are, most of us here won't see a manned Mars mission. Not the way things are being done at present, and for the likely foreseeable future. If we do, most of us will be pretty old by then.