Not Money Keeping USA From Mars, It's Lack of Vision & Will

"The cost of a manned mission to Mars has varied greatly in recent years. In 2012, the head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brent Sherwood, said it could cost approximately $100 billion over 30 or 40 years. Director of the Mars Institute Pascal Lee recently said it could cost up to $1 trillion over 25 years."

This is an example of how our leadership have let down the American people. Allow me to give my take on the matter at hand.

It seems that our lawmakers didn't mind putting out $16 trillion in 2008 to keep Wall Street speculators and crooked banks from going under. How many actual jobs that translated into is anybody's guess. Here says to put humans on Mars were looking at $100 billion to $1 trillion over the next 25-40 years.

People may wonder why I put those two together. The reason is this, during the height of the Apollo program, it employed 400,000 Americans. When we talk $100 billion or $1 trillion to get to Mars, it is not as if all that money gets transformed directly into space hardware. First it gets transformed into jobs, lots of them. Get it? Wall Street and Bank bailouts = "No Jobs", while space exploration and Mars colonization = "Jobs".

Remember, if you're old enough to, what happened during the 1960's. When the 60's started out our nation was behind in the "space race". Then when the 60s ended our nation was far away in the lead. The whole Apollo program cost about $110 billion. Could you imagine how far we would have been if instead of bailing out the banks and Wall Street, if instead our nation had invested all that $16 trillion bailout money into our nation's future by going balls to the wall Mars colonization, asteroid harvesting and moon mining? It has been almost 10 years past the time of the bail outs. If we had chosen a different path, we would have created millions of jobs, advanced our technology by leaps and bounds, opened up new territory and resources for our people, and maybe taken some of the environmental damage burden off our ecosystem. The banks would have been more stable because of all the people working on outer space projects, and the support jobs created because of it. Our civilization would have been far better off than we are now.

Instead of two ineffectual political parties battling it out over how to pay for health care, we would be telling the people it is no problem to pay. We'll just pay with asteroid platinum. Instead of worrying about having enough jobs for our people, we would be going to other countries and asking if they have qualified people to fill all the jobs we don't have enough people to fill.

Our problems are not going to be solved by looking inward. Our problems are not going to be solved permanently working within the closed system we are now in. The only way we are going to get out of the fix our species finds itself in it to look outward. $16 trillion would be a good start. Mars colonization, or at very least, moon mining would be starting project. We have to do it with the same urgency and devotion that existed during the Apollo era. Except this time we don't stop. There is no stopping once we start.