It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say its more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's great that people are interested in Mars.
We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.
As we visit Mars multiple times, we will build up infrastructure on the surface to expand the capabilities and reach of humans on Mars.
Every day, we get a little bit closer to the kind of expertise and the kind of experience we're going to need to go there. I'd love to be the guy walking on Mars.
People should decide 'are you willing to spend all this money to go to Mars?' I think the average person on the ground would never spend that amount of money - they have to spend it on something that makes sense and this is definitely saving our planet.
The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.
Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.
We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.
If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.