"No, we won't go to the Moon; we will visit Mars instead," says Obama

[Mik3]

I hope something comes out of this. Mars is an achievable goal for NASA but they need to get the plans in motion in 8 years or it wont happen. A base on the Moon is a silly idea imo, it would cost far to much with current tech.

 

[JRS]

Without fusion and fusion rockets, reaching Mars IS fantasy.

Again - using Apollo-era technology a manned flyby of Venus was possible. It just needed cash, something that NASA doesn't have right now thanks to decades of being starved of funds by Congress.

 

[snowdog]

As long as they hurry up, space exploration is going way too slowly, their budget should be increased as there's little future in staying on just Earth, we need more space, more resources: more planets...

 

[djkav]

All of our space exploration don't even leave high earth orbit. The ISS is just on the border of the earth's atmosphere and the start of space. The space shuttles only ever go to the upper boundary of the earths atmosphere.

Its a big risk to send a man to mars.

I'm still undecided about the apollo moon missions.

 

[GarethSouthgate]

I'm still undecided about the apollo moon missions.

What are you undecided about in particular?

 

[Cold_And_Miserable]

The moon landing conspiracy theories I suspect.

 

[Gackt]

As much as I love the idea of us being in space, we're really not ready. We still suffer from primitive in-fighting, there's mass poverty and suffering. We're a really fragmented planet. Do we really want to bring that fragmentation with us up into space? Mess up there too?

Not that we shouldn't still be up in space, and doing important work IN space. But there are higher priorities right now. Once we find the sense to stop beating eachother up, maybe we can look upwards and find places to spread to.

 

[D D Danneh]

A base on the Moon is a silly idea imo, it would cost far to much with current tech.

But it would make launching a rocket much easier and cheaper. It just depends whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

 

[Tefal]

As much as I love the idea of us being in space, we're really not ready. We still suffer from primitive in-fighting, there's mass poverty and suffering. We're a really fragmented planet. Do we really want to bring that fragmentation with us up into space? Mess up there too?

Not that we shouldn't still be up in space, and doing important work IN space. But there are higher priorities right now. Once we find the sense to stop beating eachother up, maybe we can look upwards and find places to spread to.

Sure, **** it it's not like you need everyone.

 

[GarethSouthgate]

Once we find the sense to stop beating eachother up

I doubt this will happen any time in the next 100+ years, it'll probably take 1000, if not more.

 

[Hamzter]

It if it was working there woudn't need to be all the delays and "testing". It only reached 7Tev 17 days ago, years late and not even a continuous operation.

The LHC has everything to do with space travel. Without a greater understanding of particle physics how can we hope to achieve nuclear fusion? Without fusion and fusion rockets, reaching Mars IS fantasy.

Yeh sure there's been a few delays, not exactly unexpected with a project of that magnitude, but it's up and running now, they're doing experiments as we speak! A ramp up of operations was always planned, you can't just flip a switch on something like the LHC and hope it works.

As for fusion rockets, they're purely theoretical at the moment and I doubt we'll see on in the next 50 years, if ever. I think it's more of an engineering challenge than a physics challenge to produce fusion, as it's relatively well understood (compared to a lot of the particle physics they'll be doing at the LHC). We can get to Mars using conventional rockets anyway, all that's needed is money.