The Mission To Mars

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We all know that the Global Warming zealots are a crazy bunch, they would destroy whole economies because of a .00010 increase in temperature.  Now they want to torpedo the man mission to Mars:

A squeeze on funding for satellites to look down on the Earth’s environment at a time of growing need for research into the effects of climate change is creating alarm among scientists and on Capitol Hill.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, renowned for its pioneering role in science, is seeing its science budget shrink and its satellite Earth observation capacity endangered even as the agency’s overall mission grows.

Three and a half years ago, President Bush announced “a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system,” including a return to the moon by 2020, a step toward Mars and beyond.

The ambitious program vastly expanded NASA’s mission at a time when its near Earth science programs — arguably more relevant to humankind’s needs — were in decline.

Since Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, the administration has reduced future-year funding for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate by a total of $4 billion, according to the House Science and Technology Committee’s space and aeronautics panel.

A two-year study released last January by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council found that NASA’s Earth science budget had declined 30 percent since 2000 and was threatened to fall even further.

How will they accomplish this?

Last week, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science recommended an increase of over $280 million above the requested level for NASA. However, within this budget markup, there is language that would prevent work on programs devoted to humans to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue “development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." THIS ANTI-MARS LANGUAGE MUST BE REMOVED! Otherwise, the program may turn into MOON ONLY program. We can’t let that happen.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a space junkie and I still bitterly complain that a Democrat controlled Congress cut funding to the Apollo program in 1972, just when we were getting good at visiting the moon.  They then approved money for a freakin bus to orbit the earth.  We go to the moon and then instead of going forward we move backwards.

Anyways, The Mars Society (whom members include officers serving in Iraq) has started a drive to get faxes, emails and phone calls to various politicians to get the offending language removed.

In the past week, the Mars Society "Save Mars Phone/Fax Blitz" has been a tremendous success. So far, almost 400 faxes have been sent and numerous phone calls have been made to Congress requesting that they remove the anti-Mars language that has been placed in the House version of the budget.

If you haven’t yet called or faxed your members of Congress, please do so soon using our automated system. We would like to have a total of 1,000 faxes sent within the next couple of weeks. It is imperative to remind both houses of Congress that the American people support human missions to Mars. If you have called your members of Congress or plan to, please let us know by dropping us an email at Marspolitics@yahoo.com.

And they have even started a Political Action Task Force to ensure that the human exploration of Mars remains the mission of NASA:

The purpose of the U.S. Political Task Force is to support the endeavor of The Mars Society to establish a human mission to Mars as the primary goal of the U.S. Space Program. This will be accomplished by means of an aggressive campaign of contact with our elected officials asking them to actively support the required technologies and legislation in support of this vision. The Political Task Force will mobilize and assist our membership and other space advocates with up-to-date information and the necessary tools for effective communication to accomplish this goal. Further, we will seek to act in ways that garner sufficient media and public support for the goal of sending humans to Mars.

All great programs.  Gus Grissom, the commander of Apollo One which tragically burned on the pad in 1967, once said:

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves, because in the final analysis, only Man can evaluate the Moon in terms understandable to other men.

Exploring Mars is no different.  Only another Man (or woman) can really evaluate that planet in terms understandable to other’s.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june06/nasa_05-31.html

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I was afraid of this. The Dems are up to their old tricks, once again. I spent most of the 1980’s and much of the ’90’s fighting them. They never change.

SJ Reidhead
The Pink Flamingo

Curt

On this one you and I have a different opinion.

When you look at the extreme difficulty of putting a person on Mars and getting them back it just doesn’t make sense unless someone comes up with a much faster method to get them there.

Just to feed and house them for the round trip would require a big storehouse of food or some way to grow it on the way.

It to me is very high risk with very little gain.

For the same money and effort you could almost put a mars rover a month down on the planet.

First prove to me that you can send a rover there to dig up samples and have a way to launch those samples back here for further testing before you put people at risk.

Heck we have a space shuttle that may or may not be fully built out that is a scaled down version of what the plan was.

It has never been manned to the level it was supposed to be and little if anything has been heard even on the NASA site of the results of experiments that were to be conducted there.

Weather satellite coverage losses pending at NOAA will directly effect hurricane prediction of path accuracy and this will have a direct adverse impact in many ways.

Though a manned mars mission may be nice to contemplate and a grand goal, the case to me can not be made that it’s more important than a lot of other methods of doing the exploration to obtain data.

GRR that was supposed to be space station not shuttle.

Of course it’s a risk, and it’s expensive, but much of modern technology we have today can be attributed to the science that came out of apollo and mercury. That technology has helped mankind greatly. Google space and inventions to understand just how much of the things we take for granted today came from those missions.

Just because it’s difficult does not mean it should not be attempted, I mean that is what makes mankind so great, no task is to difficult.

Robots can only pick up samples, and the endeavor to get the robot there would not be that difficult, would not cause mankind to discover and invent new technology, would not be grand.

So I vehemently disagree with your viewpoint. The only way mankind will expand and grow is to tackle the tough missions, no matter the cost. Bringing back rocks isn’t the point, it’s getting there in the first place….thats the point.