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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … .html]Main article;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … tml]Online discussion with the author; and
http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/0 … cepolitics discussion.
The article appears to be a comprehensive view from a mainstream perspective.
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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One quote:
Standing next to Aldrin was movie director James Cameron. Cameron wants to go to outer space. He's ridden the "vomit comet," the jet that uses parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness among passengers. He would be thrilled to visit Mars. He said we have to become multi-planetary, just to survive. "If we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid on an impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward with a dumb look on our faces. We need to evolve beyond the dinosaurs," he had told the conference audience minutes earlier. NASA should enlist the media and Hollywood to make the space program more visually dramatic, Cameron told me in the hall. The Mars rovers ought to be on TV. We've seen what the rovers see, but not the rovers themselves. Imagine "Titanic" through Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes without seeing DiCaprio.
and another quote
The Vision [VSE] has no official price tag, because it claims that NASA won't need any extra money to go to the moon and Mars. We'll go slowly, on the cheap. A skeptical observer might wonder how the government could inexpensively send people to another planet when it can barely afford to run trains from Washington to New York.
The Vision emits a whiff of conflict avoidance. It's almost a stealth program, an attempt to tippy-toe to the moon and beyond by noncontroversial increments. In the near term, there's no singular moment when we decide, as a country, that we're definitely doing this. John Logsdon, the sage academic who runs a think tank called the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: "If you're really cynical, you could say that this plan makes that decision without a decision . . . If it works, one day we're there."
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WaPo quotes Zubrin:
Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a proponent of rapid colonization of Mars, argues that Bush essentially said, "I think it's a good idea to go to the moon and Mars, and whoever is elected in 2012 can work on it."
Heh! Is Zubrin correct, here?
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