What are we waiting for to get into space?

[D H]

Why are we sending one rover after another to mars, instead of sending some bacterial cultures and see how they perform and how eligible they appear for the purpose of terraforming.

Whoa there! Do you know the extreme efforts the world's space agencies undertake to ensure that any vehicle that goes to Mars is completely sterile? We do not yet know if native life exists on Mars. If Mars does harbor life, Earth-based life might well be a threat to Mars-based life. Until we know that Mars truly is sterile, the space agencies make sure that whatever is sent there is sterile. If we do find Mars does harbor life, that will be the death nell of any planned human missions to Mars and of any discussions (let alone planning) of terraforming Mars.

I'm just confused why it's taking so long to go back to the Moon. 2020 is their projected date? I mean, that's super for me because I'll be out of grad school with a Ph.D. and begging NASA to let me be an astronaut, but if we did it in 1969 (and no arguments here, we did), what's taking so long to go back?

Money. NASA received 10% of the federal budget in the 1960s. Today, it receives 0.6% of the federal budget. With the recent financial collapse, NASA's share is bound to shrink even further. You do the math.

At this point in time manned space travel is a waste of valuable resources. Until we have the capability of launching and recovering spacecraft with 100% success rates why should we put a man at risk?

That argument is ludicrous. There is no such thing as a 100% success rate in any worthwhile endeavor. Until we have the capability to drive to work with 100% success rates, why should we put ourselves at risk going to work?

Some risks are worth taking. Most decision makers in this country are still of the opinion that putting people into space with a very good but not perfect success rate is one of them.

There is much that can be done robotically, we need to continue exploration, while developing reliable rocketry and systems.

There is little reason to do things robotically in space if we do not intend to put people into space. If the goal is to get the most bang for the buck out of the government's science expenditures, spending money on space science is a losing proposition. The scientific returns from robotic space exploration are tiny compared to the costs.

One country has made the decision to ban any government-funded participation in human spaceflight activities. The ban was instigated by anti-human spaceflight space scientists. Soon after the ban, that country's unmanned space budget dwindled, and dwindled, and dwindled. Today, Great Britain's space budget is a paltry $350 million per year, most of which is shipped out of the country to ESA. There are very, very few space scientists left in Great Britain.

 

[Astronuc]

Good points. It's funny you mention NASA and reactors because I read this just yesterday...

NASA Eyes Nuclear Power for Moon Base

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/080917-tw-fission-moon.html

There's a meeting planned for early next year and conference a few months later.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/nuclear2009/

http://anst.ans.org/NETS2009/About.htm

Nuclear is the bottom of NASA's priority list.

 

[Redbelly98]

Yeah, but we did it. And now we want to go back again and we are taking 2 decades to do it.

Time scales are relative. On average, it's 10's of millions of years between catastrophic asteroid impacts, or longer.

2 decades is pretty quick, in comparison.