Instead of a Bridge to Nowhere, Let's Take a Rocket to Mars!

Forty years ago today, man walked on the moon. Now is the time for a new challenge: We should attempt to send a man to Mars.

Forty years ago today, man walked on the moon.  I am but 21 years old, so Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the rest of the men that my father’s generation cheered into space are little but characters in a history book.  But I read a story saying that the Apollo 11 crew would meet the President to urge him to attempt to send man to Mars.  As I thought about it, Buzz is right.  We should go to Mars. We are in a financial crisis that is testing our country in ways that it has never been tested in before.  We now are running a massive budget deficit and the government desperately needs to cut spending.  NASA is an obvious target for cutbacks and I suspect that many in the GOP will be particularly fond of this idea.  The idea of sending a man to Mars will cause many of these individuals to have minor coronaries.  They will say that sending a man to Mars, that sending man into space, that exploration is wasteful and that we do not have the money nor the need for it.  They will ask what the practical purpose is.  The honest answer is that there is no “practical purpose” for NASA’s budget to be as large as it is and there is particularly no practical purpose for going to Mars. So why try to go to Mars?  The answer is because Mars is next.  Our history is a history filled with tackling challenges, impossible unthinkable challenges. Exploration and innovation do not have a roadmap.  It is not economical for the United States to try to send a man to Mars, but it is important, for great nations do great things, and Mars is next.  The space race did not have a practical purpose.  We developed wonderful things as a result (I’d say satellites are pretty important….), but John F. Kennedy did not thrust us into space for any specific practical purpose.  Instead, in a famous speech given at Rice University in my hometown of Houston, Texas on September 12th, 1962, Kennedy pushed the United States to do great things… for the sake of doing them.  In that speech, Kennedy famously asserted that:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

President Kennedy got it right on that day.  If his words don't give you goosebumps, I really don’t know if you are capable of being inspired. Congress throws a lot of money at projects that are completely useless.  In fact as a nation, we seem to be getting pretty good at “wasting” money.  We need to change this, but in the mean time, the members of Congress might spend less money on the “Bridge to Nowhere” and more on a rocket to somewhere.  That somewhere is MARS. MARS, ladies and gentlemen.  We should go to Mars.  Why?  To quote Sir George Mallory's famous explanation of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “because it is there.”  In Kennedy’s words, “well, space is there… and we are going to climb it.”  Damn right.