Jake's View | Forget about flag-waving from Mars, colonies on the moon are the future
The technology is available to build true communities, and money would better spent on that rather than on a race to be the first to colonise a new planet
As Nasa lobbyists are apt to remind us, such spending [on space projects] amounts to just a few dollars per capita per year, and pales in comparison with the US$3 trillion or so spent in fighting a questionable war in Iraq. But I would prefer to see significant billions drawn from this budget and spent on our more earthly challenges.
David Dodwell,
Back to Business, October 3
I’m all for saving that US$3 trillion that the American death machine has spent on destroying Iraq but I’m a loonie, not a lizard, and I differ with David here. I want to look out to space from the moon rather than look down where we crawl on earth.
My regret is that once again the debate on how to do it has been sidetracked into staging a manned mission to Mars. It’s Tesla boss Elon Musk who is leading us the wrong way this time with his SpaceX project. Mars is all wrong. Just for starters, how is any Mars colony to deal with temperature variations of 160 degrees Celsius, persistent dust typhoons of up to 150km/h and an atmosphere so thin as to put the colonists in constant grave danger from solar flares and cosmic rays?