I don't know why I have such a bad feeling about Bush's upcoming space program announcement. Maybe it's having lived through Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and seen it all come crashing down in a pointless bureaucratic morass, I'm cynical.
This may seem hopelessly naive, but we really thought, back in 1969, that Clarke & Kubrick's 2001 was a fair prediction. We were wrong of course, right down to PanAm. Instead of the Moon, Mars and Jupiter, we got Shuttle, some kind of tinkertoy "space station", some really neat robots, 14 dead heroes and lots of bureaucratic waste.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it should also give one foresight when the same question comes up again. There should be only one goal for a lunar colony -- to be a permananet, self-supporting human habitation. Failing that, there is no real point.
Apollo was neat and all, but it was one-off. A Mars expedition now would be the same. I'd much rather see 10,000 people living permanently in Luna City, and a few vonBraun wheels in orbit, than one Mars landing. Because, given that, the rest of the solar system is wide open.
But if it's 2030, and we've got nothing permanent still, it won't matter much that we've been to Mars.
UPDATE: This article purports to have the details on the President's plan (via Transterrestrial Musings)
Hear ! Hear!!
Posted by: Claire at January 11, 2004 06:25 PM