Go To Mars, Skip The Moon?

This Wired News report (Americans Find Out NASA Is Going Back to the Moon) offers an answer to the question about why we should go to the Moon first instead of going direclty to Mars:

It's a good idea to go to the moon to not only check out all systems and hardware, but more importantly (and more transferably) to design surface-operations protocols, to work out kinks and most importantly for a new generation of space explorers -- to build up experience before the more-challenging Mars expeditions.

Going to Mars will always be dangerous, but if we use the Moon as a practice run we can improve our chances of success on Mars.

Comments

[Darnell Clayton]

I completely agree! While I would love to go to Mars, the fact of the matter is that the red planet is a lot further than our moon, so if anything life threatening happens on there, the astronauts are on their own.

The moon is the perfect place to test out how long we can survive independently of Earth's blessing, which will be needed if we are to seriously conquer the red planet.

[Joel]

Darnell, thanks for your comment. I think a lot of this will depend on the next election and the funding priorities of the next president. I don't underestimate the power that we, as a space advocacy community, now have, thanks to the internet. We just need to keep up the effort and build public support for an intelligent program of manned exploration, and that means doing things methodically (as in going t the moon first) and not going for the high drama (Mars direct). We need to urge NASA to be creative in selling the Moon-Mars program to the public.