General Discussion

...it was about a geopolitical effort to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a visible technological advantage over the U.S., for whatever that effort was actually worth.

There is no similar national need to make that schoolyard gesture again. Space exploration was never primarily about the adventure. America didn't invest all of that money to go on a lark.

There has to be a national mission that involves more than a Star Trek show for space enthusiasts. That's why there will likely never be a manned mission to Mars, an endeavor which would require a dubious and complicated terraforming of the planet to spark a theoretical re-evolution of life.

We're not just going to go there and set up something like we did in the desert with cities under globes, and there's nothing a human can do there that a robot can't which has any intrinsic value to people on this planet.

Besides, the moment we reach the point where we're able to re-animate life on Mars, that technology could then be employed on THIS planet to preserve and sustain it, obviating the need to colonize other deadened planets in some sort of dystopian fantasy.


I do see a push this year from some for the nuclear reactor on the moon that would be required to facilitate a manned Mars mission - a scheme which reeks of a stalking horse for the ambition to put nuke weapons in space; a reanimation of the star wars ambitions to put nukes on space platforms.

The moon reactor would be the hook or producing that tech on earth and open the door to even more plutonium pits which allow for the production of the 'usable nukes' that successive republican presidencies and majorities have tried to make happen for decades now.

Space enthusiasts have long used ridicule about fears of the re-expansion of nuclear production and have been completely indifferent to the real aim of these people to expand and continue the nuclear weapon madness that our government has reduced to the point where we're not talking about eliminating them anymore, much less about the waste that's already been produced which we can't safely dispose of and just sits in barrels somewhere, many buried and infecting our water.

It makes sense to me that a charlatan like Musk is spearheading this, along with a load of corporatists, playing off the dreams of people who think it's Star Trek 'exploring strange new worlds' theater.