Comfort Eagle

Somewhere around last week I read the article about Barack Obama's push to cut NASA's funding of manned space flights (Link) in favor of funding for education. Now, I can justify this on the grounds that the American education system is in need of improvement and does outweigh most all other programs. But that did raise a question for me.

Why should mankind send a man to mars?

My main opinion was always that space flight is an advancement of human knowledge. But then again, the International Space Station already conducts low-gravity tests in many ways. And unmanned crafts keep discovering more and more about deep space, does that mean manned flights are pointless? Is going to mars just an act of hubris? Is there any applicable reasons to have a space station on mars other than it being really cool and leading to movies depicting its awesomeness?

Discovery of whether life exists, or existed at some point on Mars can only be done by manned exploration. Trying to find fossils with remote probes would be like dropping a robot into the Himalaya and expecting it to dig up a dinosaur.


Finding out whether life developed on Mars will instantly redefine our views on abiogenesis and the formation of life. This alone has massive scientific and philosophical ramifications that would justify the mission.


Humans can do in a day what it takes robots a year to do. When we want to learn anything serious about Mars, we'll be sending a manned team to do it. We should already have, but the combination of the NASA beauracracy bloat and the lack of economic/political will has held us back.


edit: And as I said in the other thread, Japan, India and China all aim to put people on the moon by 2020 in separate programs. Just because the pioneers of space are getting lazy and have lost the political will doesn't mean that the up and comers have. America has a huge headstart, but if they don't re-prioritize a little we will have been left behind in fifty years.