Trump Announces Mission to Send Astronauts to Mars

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Trump said “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars by launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.

30 thoughts on “Trump Announces Mission to Send Astronauts to Mars”

  1. NASA has had at it’s disposal, the technology to get to Mars since the mid 1980’s.

    So, NASA IS the problem!

    May this not be another political talk fest, it is past time to assemble some readily available space hardware, and actually burn some propellant. But not in the NASA bureaucratic style, it is too late for the bureaucrats to intervene, they have had their chances at getting to Mars….. some very serious “thinning of the ranks” are well in order!

  2. Lots of work will need to be done, not just to send them to Mars, but to keep them alive up there as well. Some people have guts so they are willing to take such risks, let them.

    Now let their actions speak for themselves if there were just political promises, manipulations to get elected or not.

    If you ask me tariffs are just one extra layer of bureaucracy and not in the principles of the free trade. If you cant compete, raise tariffs.

  3. What if humans and Mars are not compatible? I mean, humans have a hard enough time living short term on the Earth or orbiting space stations.

    • That, in fact, should be tested early on, before sending colonists.

      You want to test the long term propellant storage and life support prior to a manned trip to Mars, so the simplest thing is to do it in orbit, with two Starships tied together with a tether, spinning about each other bolo style. By adjusting fuel loads first, one can be at lunar gravity, the other Martian gravity.

      This gives you a chance to test the long duration systems in orbit, and at the same time test the human response to Martian and lunar gravity.

      I’d expect Musk to do something like that late next year, assuming the development schedule goes well. He can probably get some money from NASA for doing it, they’ll be interested in the results.

  4. “decentralized as possible”
    How decentralized can that be & still have a way to settle without violence who has property rights in some particularly rich deposit of some very useful material?

    • You go, you build something and you claim it. It’s not that hard.

      Except of course, it’s in space and going is the hard part.

  6. It shouldn’t just be mission to Mars.

    What we really need is a wholesale lifting of the regulatory burdens that are smothering progress on almost every front.

    You know why we had such a boom in IT and the internet? Because software was about the only area of commerce not already mired in regulation, so people could innovate without having to beg some regulator’s permission.

    We need to restore that dynamism to the economy, and that means regulations have to be drastically rolled back. We need to restore an economy where people can do innovative things and profit from it without crawling to Washington for permission, which won’t be granted because their established competitors have already bought the regulators.

    If we can do that, we’ll see an economic boom the likes of which the world has hardly ever seen. The future is struggling to be born, and the regulators are doing everything they can to prevent it.

    • Which of the following would you most like removed? Minimum salary dropped, monopolistic practices allowed, price cartels decriminalized, no limit to number of working hours, health and safety rules removed, instant firing without reason or compensation allowed, health benefits removed, pollution restrictions lifted, seizure of private land allowed, corporation tax removed, insider trading decriminalized.

      • I’m totally missing how any of those are relevant to what I wrote.

        Take as an example Dr. Fahy’s research on thymus involution. He has developed a protocol that seems to effectively reverse a key aspect of aging, the collapse of your immune system due to degeneration of the thymus. So far the results have been dramatic, this is as close to a fountain of youth as anybody has as yet found.

        The potential benefits to the economy are absolutely staggering. Delaying elevated medical expenses due to aging by perhaps a decade would be a trillion dollar shot in the arm for our economy, and might help save Social security from bankruptcy.

        The clinical studies have been extremely hobbled by medical regulations, and although his protocol is public domain, you can’t pay your doctor to duplicate it, because it relies on administration of human growth hormone, which is more tightly regulated than fentanyl.

        Does that have anything to do with seizure of private property?

        • This is where AI can excel.

          Humans are not sitting at a desk making completely unbiased decisions; they’re plotting how to advance to the “next level”.

          They’re plotting to hobble the person above them, to get their job.

          They’re hung over and miss a decimal point.

          An AI is not looking for a better position, or shutting down a project because a rival company offered their son-in-law a no-show job.

          And an AI doesn’t sick-strike for shorter hours or better pay.

          How lean can the Fed gov get?

          How many humans can be replaced?

          Not by individual robots, but by dedicated AI in a half-dozen server farms.

          How much more streamlined can a permitting process get, if the call is made instantly/unemotionally?

          How much pay and retirement entitlements could be saved?

          AI can’t have the final word, but it can surely do most every step up to that point.

          • Reminds me of the Jetsons, where George’s job was to press a button if a light came on, and he had a robot present to remind him to do it if he forgot to. But the robot could not touch the button itself…

            Literally the only purpose for his job was that there would be a human in the loop somewhere.

      • Strawman, You are equating examples of useful regulation with the problem of excessive over-regulation and saying your counterparts are attacking the useful.

  7. Missing one important part on this. Musk was going to fund it regardless, so now he has federal backing (e.g. no more political launch blocking) and wider support, plus effective subsidy via scientific payloads that will be added. Just means that Musks timelines may well be more believable now, especially with the fixed launch windows of Mars proximity.
    Will also be the first interplanetary robot to set “foot” on another planet…. not roll… although it may also be fun to see a Teslabot step off the stairs, half sink into the dust and fall over. One small step, aaaarrrrggh (recieved several minutes after the event…)….

  8. Surprised the statement wasn’t “We will go to Mars and make the Martians pay for it”. Trump missed an opportunity there.

    • Why is that so?

      If you are making a colony, you want to bring your civilization and culture with you and call the place yours.

      And a Musk Mars city won’t be a Mecca of rainbow multiculturalism. It will be mostly American, for whomever affiliates with that nation and identity.

      If China do it too, it will be the same thing: their territory and civilization in whatever they build.

      Until of course, they diverge and want to break off the country that built them. But that’s a problem for another day.

  10. This is the Trump I kind of thought we were electing 8 years ago. Apparently there’s nothing like a bullet grazing your ear and having only one term remaining to give you a proper sense of urgency.

  11. The primary requirement here is that the government affirmatively get out of SpaceX’s way. Frankly, expensive? Nasa’s budget would easily cover it if given to SpaceX, instead of frittered away the way they usually do on the most expensive possible bespoke hardware, and advancing the bleeding edge when conventional technology will get the job done.

    Look at Nasa’s Moon plans: Unnecessarily, expensively complex. Deliberately so, because their objective wasn’t to return to the Moon, it was to use returning to the Moon to advance the art as much as possible, even if doing it that way made the mission much slower and more expensive.

    • I half agree with you. NASA certainly has made expensive mistakes (both time and money wise). NASA has a role and private industry has a role to play. The role of private industry is growing as space becomes profitable, which is mostly a good thing. Not sure I agree that NASAs budget should be taken away and given to SpaceX.

      • What I think specifically should be done with NASA’s budget, is that most of it should be devoted to a system of X prizes, where the first domestic entity to achieve a goal gets a load of money, and where the goal is specified in terms of what gets accomplished, NOT the details of how it was accomplished.

    • Make the colonies independent of not only of Earth but each other. Mars does not and should be one nation. They can cooperate and work together, but it should be as decentralized as possible and not ran by Earth.

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