Astronomers spot most Earth-like planet yet

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

While I agree with you in spirit, and space travel will likely never be Star Trek, in 1970, we sent manned missions to the moon. Since 1997, we have sent four unmanned but increasingly complex rovers to Mars, culminating in a seriously proposed (albeit with dubious dates of launch) potential manned exploration.

The technology exists to send a manned mission to Mars tomorrow, the trouble is in allocating some of the budget toward space exploration.

In 2010, we had a $1.03 trillion military budget to the $18.724 billion budget for NASA.



The problem is not starving masses, it's where the money is being spent. If those figures were reversed, or even halved, we would have easily been able to launch a colony ship to Mars, 4 years ago.

When I mentioned starving masses, I was referring to starships, not interplanetary travel. I agree that the technical aspects of a manned trip to Mars are possible (though daunting), but I think you're being overly optimistic in saying you could launch 'tomorrow'.

But so what? Assuming you could get your crew to Mars alive and healthy, that's not really colonization in any meaningful sense, anymore than the Apollo missions amounted to lunar colonization.

Boru