Jim, ancient Egypt developed from a simple civilization to a superpower because they diverted much of their economic output to build the pyramids. The pyramids themselves were useless, but the effort that went into building led to a more advanced bureacratic system.

Have a glass of wine, hug your child, enjoy life. What’s wrong with more and better TV channels and cell phone communications? What’s wrong with weather satellites and GPS? These by-products of the space age have improved our lives. What will make manned space exploration work is the potential to make money – and there’s nothing wrong with that. Columbus didn’t discover the new world out of scientific curiosity, he did it to find a shorter route to the markets and wealth of the Orient. The sooner investors can see the profit potential of space exploration, the sooner it will happen.

I am angry at the generation who decided not to go back, and I am angrier at the generation that was inspired by it as children, and then used space to squeeze more channels of television into our living rooms. I am angry that we did this, and then basically that was it.

I was born 5 years after the moon landing and in my life time no man has set foot on the moon. In all of the wonder of what we achieved is the stunning failure to make those trips mean anything other than a gold star on the cold war score board. It makes those trips meaningless and insufferable political stunts that just happened to have some value to some kooky scientists somewhere…

We have to go back to the moon and beyond, but everyone just whines about it – Its too hard, too costly, too dangerous. Yes. it is all of those things. But it is the naysayers who want those things to stand in the way that are truly the greatest encumbrance to future achievements. Overcoming the stagnancy of the current generation in power, who doesnt do anything that doesnt provide instant gratification, that doesnt understand the concept of sacrifice and perseverance will possibly be even a greater achievement than putting a boot print in the red soil of Mars.

Yes I am bitter. I pray that my one month old son wont be writing a similar message on a blog at the 50th or any future anniversary of this great travesty. I am not currently hopeful.

This is only true if you define science very narrowly to mean planetary science. Even then it’s a a short-sighted position to hold.

The most important reason to put people into space is to get better at doing it.

Granted, today or even ten or twenty or fifty years from now you’ll get more value for your scientific buck with automated probes. But if you had the choice today of having a team of trained scientists with rovers, on-site laboratories and whatever other tools they’d need, living on Mars for years at a time or another round of probes scratching at the surface which would you choose? Without the cost and risk considerations it’s a no-brainer.

If our goal is ultimately to have people in space then we better figure out how to do it. The only way to get better at putting people into space is to keep putting people into space.

There seems to be a popular misconception that since we’ve been to the moon once, the technology is old hat, but we’ve got loads to learn about launch vehicles and landers and shuttles and rovers and habitats and self-sustaining life support and the long term effects of extraterrestrial environments on humans, animals and plants etc. etc. etc. After all we didn’t leap directly from papyrus coracles to the Santa Maria.

Is it going to be expensive? Yes, but all that money is spent in the U.S. and compared to everything else we go into debt for at least our grandchildren can expect some return on this.

It would also be good for the environment, because people will have less money to spend, so there will be less CO2 emissions.

In your scenario, people would be spending on science instead of war. The same overall amount of economic activity would ensue, and thus the same general level of CO2 emission. One can’t really change CO2 emission by much just by changing what is produced. To change CO2 emission we have to change where we get the energy that drives our economy. Conservation helps too, of course.