New Mars Forums

You know, why doesn't Trump talk to the President of Fox News? Maybe he could arrange for them to receive a broadcast license, so Fox News can go over the airwaves instead of one needing a cable or a direct satellite subscription to receive Fox News. You see left wing propaganda is free, but you have to pay for Fox News! Fox News has plenty of commercials, why can't they be funded entirely by the commercial slots they sell? It always disturbed me that whenever I go to an airport there is CNN but no Fox News. A foreigner would land at a US airport and immediately be confronted with a television screen displaying CNN and its rants against the President of the United States, do we really need to be showing foreigners this? I bet if I landed in Moscow, there wouldn't be RNN bashing Putin! The Conservative Media needs greater penetration to balance out the lefty libs on the airwaves, maybe with the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government, we can arrange to make this happen.

I hope you are 18 years old then, because I'm 49! As for what Scott wants, maybe he expects an astronaut to show up and punch somebody in the nose, that is his defense force!

Nuclear missile sites are targets for nuclear weapons themselves, So my question is would you rather have a nuclear missile silo next to your home and a target for enemy nuclear missiles trying to take them out, or on the Moon? If they were on the Moon,  nuclear missile would only take out that silo on the Moon, that warhead would thus not be available for destroying cities!

Kind of makes my point that all colonies must be defended, and if they are not, somebody else will take them over and defend them. Do you want to expend resources to build  Mars Colony and then have some other power take it over with military force because you left it undefended?

We can build stuff on the Moon before we send humans there, using teleoperated robots. Robot time is not as expensive as human time on the Moon. On Mars this is harder to do as we don't have near real time teleoperation as we do on the Moon. So all we have to do is send the machines to the Moon to carve habitats out of bedrock, before we send an actual human to live there. I'm pretty sure the machines would weigh less than the actual bedrock they would be carving. We would probably need to seal up the cracks with some resin so air doesn't leak out. And of course the airlock doors would probably have to be brought from Earth.

Scientists have worked for that madman Stalin, and other scientists worked for Hitler, some are working now for the bearded wonders of Iran. Seems most of the time scientists are subservient to irrational people. Lunatics and nutcases often rise to the pinnacles of their societies, while the scientists end up working for them, building weapons of mass destruction.

I don't think we need much political will now. If the economics work out right, we can send things and people into space for profit, we just need to get government out of the way The SLS is a dinosaur, a relic of the Apollo era, he era of the throw away booster, and era that is almost at an end, due to certain technological developments such as landing boosters and reusing them. This should make space travel cheaper and less reliant an appropriations from the government. If we can reuse boosters, it would make more sense to build large ones if we can get more than one use out of them. If we can cut down on the loss of hardware, we can reduce the costs to get into space, and thereby send larger things into space as well. This makes a manned mission to Mars more feasible. A lunar base could be financed almost entirely by private funds, with perhaps a little government encouragement. The era of big space cost plus contractors is almost over! The SLS may be obsolete by the time it is finally built, because it has taken so long to get to this point, and the World has moved on. To recoup some of the losses from building a giant expendable booster at government expense, I say we use it to mount an unmanned mission to the outer planets before it becomes obsolete. I think a robust mission to the moon Titan might be just the thing, or we haven't had any Neptune or Uranus orbiters, maybe its time we give those two outer gas giants some more attention. How about a Galileo of Cassini style orbiter mission to Uranus and Neptune? You think the SLS could be used for that?

I see, Mars does not have the necessary elements to make them.

Energize!

I don't know how you would screen immigrants to Mars, its "border" is as big as the surface of the planet! All you need to get to Mars is a spaceship, and we can't send enough people to Mars to properly man a border patrol to prevent "illegals" from landing somewhere on the planet's surface.

A proper constitution limits what government can do, not what people can do! Governments are required to defend the country, but we need a constitution and a division of powers in government to defend us from government. There must also be a limit on the government's ability to appropriate property and redistribute it however it sees fit! Why should anyone save or invest if the government does this? And thus the economy stagnates and gets poorer, because people are not working if they are not allowed to keep that which they earned.