The New York Times has an article about the prospect of sending people to Mars less expensively by NOT BRINGING THEM BACK.
Now THAT is outside the beltway thinking!
Who knew our space program was being hobbled all these years by an antiquated insistence that people who are shot into space should expect to be brought back. Alive even!
The article suggests that many people, especially scientists, would be perfectly willing to sign up for a one way ticket to the red planet where they could live out the remainder of their lives doing SCIENCE! Think of the exciting research they would probably produce! Oxygen producing machines, water producing machines, cosmic ray block (SPF 40 X 1023)…
Cosmic rays, it turns out, are less likely to give you superpowers than cancer. I KNOW! I was shocked by that thought too. Turns out that even if we DO try to bring the astronauts back to earth, they will STILL DIE sooner than if they hadn’t gone to Mars.
That brings us to part two of the plan: send old folks. Well, it stands to reason that if you are going to shorten someone’s life, you should make it be by the smallest PERCENTAGE possible. If you shave three years off the life of someone who is 100, then you have only knocked off 3%. If you do that to someone who is 50 then it balloons to 6%. If you sent a one year old it would be a staggering 300% of his life so far! Outrageous!
Sen. Al Franken (D – MN) proposed in one of his books that sending senior citizens into space would help solve the Social Security crisis. No, really he did. Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
(Of course it was one of his humor books and very funny, I might add.)
I can see the advertisement now:
Yes, Mars is the land of Milk of Magnesia and Honey flavored cough drops. Send Granny to a better place. ALL her health care needs will be provided FREE OF COST on Mars. You will be GUARANTEED BY THE GOVERNMENT a regular EMAIL UPDATE from Granny, since radio signals from Mars tend to be garbled. Don’t you worry about Granny! She’s made of hardy, pioneer stock!
The last bit of the article I found interesting was the account of polling scientists about whether or not they would sign up for such a trip.
One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand.
I imagine that later that day he told them how much science could be conducted by someone who jumped into a volcano and they all made a mad dash like so many apocryphal lemmings leaping gleefully to their molten doom.
Ask NOT what your country can do for you, just get your butt on the rocket Professor Granny!