(from VanityFair)
Buzz Aldrin Is Not All That Impressed With Walking on the Moon
(Q)President Obama gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April, promising to increase NASA’s funding by six billion and send astronauts to Mars in the next two decades. Do you believe him?
(A)I do. But what he’s describing is a very leisurely way. He’s talked about getting a bunch of things in the orbit of Mars by… what year did he say again?
The mid-2030s.
Well that’s all well and good. But I want to land on the damn place! And I want to minimize the expense. I want to make sure that when they land, they’ve got a support system. I’m convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we’re eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don’t come back? What if they stay there?
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(A)I do. But what he’s describing is a very leisurely way. He’s talked about getting a bunch of things in the orbit of Mars by… what year did he say again?
The mid-2030s.
Well that’s all well and good. But I want to land on the damn place! And I want to minimize the expense. I want to make sure that when they land, they’ve got a support system. I’m convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we’re eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don’t come back? What if they stay there?
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