what is the goal of sending people to mars? these people will discover free energy over there, which will allow them to create vast enclosures that shield them from the deadly radiation, and heat them from the insanely cold temperatures? this does not add up for me. i guess its cool to just send people into space to explore, but sending robots is way cheaper and has tons of other advantages. this smacks of moon landing nostalgia. i guess they will bring a mars car to cruise around on, plant a flag, capture some heart warming video. i'm all for the technology development but sending people there this early seems like putting the wrong foot forward. let elon musk do this shit, he will do it better than nasa, which is at the mercy of congress's and the president's whims. musk created a rocket that's 90% more efficient than nasa's rockets as side project, then he made it do a hover landing. thats what a manned mars mission needs, elon's rocket that lands itself, not nasa's 20 year old design. i guess when trillions of dollars worth of work and decades of nasa's attention goes up in smoke and some brave explorers meet their fate it will be worth it because humans have creative thinking that robots dont have or something. pls can someone explain to me why nasa should be focusing on putting humans on this gravity well? i love nasa, that's why im ranting, i want them to do the cool things they do, not blow people up in expensive new ways. figure out fucking black matter. 70 percent of the universe is this shit and we have no idea what its deal is. design some gear to get to the bottom of that, maybe we can get some free energy out of it, then we can send people to mars to drive around.
i guess this ship will be used to send people to asteroids which is cool, and could end up being useful if we need to do a bruce willis on an asteroid, it's just the sending people to mars thing that bugs me. i'm thinking its tacked on and it wont materialize. maybe if they incorporate musk's landing technology somehow, but the useful aspect of this ship definitely seems to be asteroids.