My favourite thing about this thread is how keen people are to send a bunch of people to their deaths and waste a chunk of resources while doing so.

During the moon landing in 1969 they were actually unsure if the mission would be a success. In the event the astronauts were trapped on the moon and unable to come back they had prepared a speech in their honour and a document saying what to do and when.

Google it up some time, it makes for kind of disturbing reading...

My favourite thing about this thread is how keen people are to send a bunch of people to their deaths and waste a chunk of resources while doing so.

I'm against unnecessary risk, but I want --- eventually --- to have a good way off this rock. Maybe it is within my lifetime, maybe my grandchildren's lifetime, maybe ten centuries from now. Many people share this goal for humanity.

I know quite a few individuals who would be thrilled to be picked for a one-way mission to Mars. Several of my neighbors put their names on the Mars One list, one made it through the rounds.

Similarly several of our own site members put their name in, IIRC it was L Spiro who passed the rounds of selection, he may be in the same status.

Different people have different priorities, and different things they value. Everybody is going to die eventually, being able to make some choices about the method seems a good thing. Imagine if nobody agreed to pilot airplanes due to the risk, or if nobody agreed to take boats away from shore due to the risk, or nobody agreed to drive motorized vehicles due to the risk. The world would be a very different place.

Also, someone recently died doing just that, piloting an experimental space plane for Virgin. I think it's the first death involved with a commercial space travel company. The harsh reality is we will have more accidents if space travel comes close to being as routine as air travel, so it's inevitable. But any sensible business will put safety before performance, even if it means delaying launches for now.

While Mars One is a nice idea conceptually, personally I find it lacking in concrete plans or resources before I can take it more seriously. But I'm gonna keep an eye on it though and see if anything worthwhile unfolds.

Moon. It's closer than Mars. We could learn so much still by trying to establish outposts and extend the stays of people over longer durations. Then once we've got an idea down and perhaps the infrastructure in place we could broaden our horizons. But, apart from some monumental revolution in space travel, we should take the long term and sustained approach to space exploration. Space isn't going anywhere any time soon and the sun isn't gonna blow up for at least a million generations so we have time to feed the hungry.

The Moon is drifting away but it's not going to just fly off from the Earth. It's stealing angular momentum from the Earth and increasing its own energy as it does (elevating its orbit) and eventually in the far distant future the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon and it will then stop drifting away.

There are no more terrestrial planets with a decent magnetosphere in our solar system. Move along Captain, Alpha Centauri is not so far away!

Don't for get if you go to Mars get all your teeth pulled.

long way to go to get a case of CastAway the movie.

anyone going to mars will mean death like 70% plus.

Moon base first make resources build platforms and move out from there way smarter. Anything other = fail fail fail .

Does anybody reading this know anything about the viability of extracting Helium 3 from the moon for use in fusion nuclear reactors on Earth?

Does anybody reading this know anything about the viability of extracting Helium 3 from the moon for use in fusion nuclear reactors on Earth?

We don't have fusion reactors yet ....

Does anybody reading this know anything about the viability of extracting Helium 3 from the moon for use in fusion nuclear reactors on Earth?

We don't have fusion reactors yet ....

Well supposedly some of the more recent missions to the moon from other countries were for extracting Helium 3 for testing fusion reactors. I'm not too sure about it.

Also, someone recently died doing just that, piloting an experimental space plane for Virgin. I think it's the first death involved with a commercial space travel company. The harsh reality is we will have more accidents if space travel comes close to being as routine as air travel, so it's inevitable. But any sensible business will put safety before performance, even if it means delaying launches for now.

While Mars One is a nice idea conceptually, personally I find it lacking in concrete plans or resources before I can take it more seriously. But I'm gonna keep an eye on it though and see if anything worthwhile unfolds.

It was the same thing with air travel when it first started: it was considered very unsafe. Look where we are now. If space travel becomes common, I have no doubt that it will become as safe as sea and air travel today. The thing is that there's no good reason for anybody with the money to spend the money required for space travel. Mainly it's because there's no particularly good reason to do it. The costs involved are simply too high for any potential payoff (which there isn't much of at the moment). Unless we discover mountains made of gold (or something of equal value) on Mars or the moon, I don't see huge effort being put into space missions. The only reason the space race started initially was because a): the implications for ICBM technology were huge and b): it was a matter of showing the world that Capitalism/Communism is better. The Cold War has ended. There's no reason to continue.