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You want to know the truth about this Moon-Mars thing? Within the Manned Flight to Mars advocacy community, there has always been a subgroup that sincerely believed that we should go to the Moon first, first of all, because they like the Moon, unlike most people who think it's boring to go back there, and second of all, because they think that perfecting technologies for long term manned spaceflight on the Moon will then make it easier to then go to Mars. For some reason, these people got ahold of one of Bush's speechwriters, and they put this Moon-Mars goal in Bush's speech.

In the English language, people use the phrase "stepping stone" as a metaphor meaning by doing something first, it makes it easier to do something else later. Cloning a sheep was a "stepping stone" to cloning a human. Learning BASIC is a "stepping stone" to learning C++ or FORTRAN. Learning phi^4 theory is a "stepping stone" to learning QED. The bosinic string was a "stepping stone" to superstring theory. Now, advocates of the Moon-Mars strategy claim that going to the Moon is a "stepping stone" to going to Mars, meaning that we will develop technologies while going to the Moon that we could then use to go to Mars, and it supposedly would make it easier to go to Mars.

What happened next is that president Bush, all the pundits on television, the media, TIME magazine, etc. were all so stupid that they totally and utterly misunderstood this expression "stepping stone" to meaning that going to the Moon would be some sort of literal "stepping stone" to Mars, as if the astronauts, on their way to Mars, would somehow stop off at the Moon, while on their way to Mars. In TIME magazine they literally say, with a streight face, that the ship that would carry humans to Mars would be built on the surface of the Moon, and then launched from the surface of the Moon, which is absolute sheer insanity. I'm sure Bush thinks that the astronauts would go from the Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to Mars, and that stopping off at the Moon on their way to Mars would somehow make it easier to go to Mars, like stopping at a rest stop while driving a long distance on vacation. This is absolute sheer insanity, and shows how mind boggingly stupid these people. This is absolutely not what the Moon-Mars advocates intended when they whispered in the ear of Bush's speechwriter.

I think we should absolutely go the Mars, but a manned flight to Mars would cost about 30 billion dollars, and Bush only appropriated one million dollars for his combined program of going to both the Moon and Mars, which is as insulting as delibrately leaving a waitress a tip of one penny.

Keep in mind, Bush's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, also declared that he was going to have a manned flight to Mars, but after publically declaring it, nothing ever happened.

Jeffery Winkler

http://www.geocities.com/jefferywinkler … erywinkler