Your Tax Dollars At Work - Mars Edition

In an article in the February 23rd issue of Rolling Stone Bejamin Wallace-Wells writes about another of President Bush's ideas to make us great. The article, "Mars or Bust" , is about Bush's plan to take us to Mars. I have to ask ... Is there oil on Mars?




"When the president announced that NASA would send astronauts to the moon by 2020 as practice for a manned landing on Mars, the idea was dismissed as election-year grandstanding, a laughable attempt to cast Bush as a figure of history. "An unserious proposal," predicted The Washington Post, "succeeding merely in sounding big and capturing newspaper headlines.".....

Impressed by such leaping aims, Congress has endorsed the Mars mission as NASA's sole goal, even though the effort is expected to take fifty years and cost at least $500 billion. To pay for the mission, the agency is threatening to cancel other, less flashy projects -- like the Hubble telescope and the Voyager satellites -- that have resulted in some of America's most valuable and groundbreaking research. .....

With the exception of the astronauts and engineers involved in the Mars mission, few scientists think the Vision is a particularly good idea. If you polled scientists, most would say there is "no real scientific justification for a manned trip to Mars," says Joseph Alexander, senior staff officer of the space studies board at the National Academy of Sciences. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the Mars mission will cost more than the $104 billion that NASA has projected through 2018, forcing the agency to cancel more promising experiments. Abbey, the former Johnson director, says the price tag will ultimately run as high as $500 billion. "The projections they've put together for budgets are pipe dreams," confirms one NASA insider. "You're talking about a project on the order of $500 billion, and right now they're budgeting $1 billion per year for it. Sooner or later, the Vision will either have to swallow much of the science funding or it will die."

Than again maybe there is no oil on Mars. Just lots of pork.

Rolling Stone - Mars Or Bust