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Policy

Good News Everyone: Another Closed Door Humans to Mars Thing

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 17, 2015
Filed under ,
Good News Everyone: Another Closed Door Humans to Mars Thing

Top Space Science, Industry & Policy Leaders Address Strategy to Send Humans to Mars, Planetary Society
“The Planetary Society’s “Humans Orbiting Mars” workshop is an invitation-only gathering of top science, engineering, and policy professionals. The goal of the workshop is to build consensus on the key elements of a long-term, cost constrained, executable Program to send humans to Mars. This program would consist of a series of steps leading to a Mars orbital mission and potential rendezvous with the Martian moon, Phobos, in the early 2030s as a crucial step towards future missions that will land on the surface of the Red Planet. While the workshop itself will be closed to the media, a press briefing will follow and a full report will be released later in the year.”
Keith’s note: Here we go again. First we had the Pioneering Space National Summit – a closed door, mystery participant, no-media event concerning human spaceflight which will produce output at a later TBD date – an event that excluded the Planetary Society. Not to be out done, the Planetary Society is going to have their own closed door, mystery participant, no-media event concerning human spaceflight which will produce output at a later TBD date. The three participants at the press event after the actual workshop are not going to say anything that they have not said a hundred times before and will most certainly give it their own spin anyway. And of course this effort will not coordinate with anything that came from the other momentous space policy event – even though the topics both addressed (apparently) have great potential overlap and synergy.
Yet once again the space advocates will claim that they have accomplished something by talking about things.
Here’s a crazy idea: Why not wait to have this discussion until May when the Humans to Mars Summit discuses the same things that these two stealth events discussed except that they do so IN PUBLIC and ONLINE?
While only a few people will actually get inside the spacecraft that go to Mars, everyone else gets to pay for these trips one way or another. After three decades of waving their arms around behind closed doors it is time for these space advocacy groups to get off their asses, step out into the sunshine, and publicly discuss the plans that they have to spend everyone else’s tax dollars – and do so by actually involving these taxpayers. Otherwise these space advocate leaders/experts need to sit down and shut up and stop complaining that no one is listening or that no one understands.
Given the slow motion implosion of the Mars One reality TV show/infomercial/pyramid scheme that very same taxpaying public is going to wonder whether any of these humans to Mars concepts are viable. I am not certain that any of the current crop of space activists is qualified to answer that question since they were either shamelessly cheering this stunt on or hiding from the media to avoid publicly casting any doubt.
That said, someone in the space world needs to get serious – about being serious – and they need to do so soon. Otherwise no one is going to go to Mars any time soon.
Related links below

More Choir Practice in an Echo Chamber by the Usual Suspects, earlier post
Yet Another Space Group: The Space Illuminati, earlier post
Alliance for Space Development Revealed (Yawn), earlier post
Recent Space Poll: The Public is Not Always in Synch With Space Advocates, earlier post
Pioneering Space National Summit Details Emerge, earlier post
Yet Another Plan For Outer Space, earlier post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

8 responses to “Good News Everyone: Another Closed Door Humans to Mars Thing”

  1. DTARS says:
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    http://caseyexaustralia.blo

    If NASA were really trying to go to Mars here is a guess how Elon might do it.

    Doesn’t look like SLS/Orion does it?

  2. TheBrett says:
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    Since it’s the Planetary Society, I wondered if maybe it was a private shindig for some of the bigger donors.

  3. numbers_guy101 says:
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    Strange psychology at work nowadays. I’ve been given heads up on some if these, discovering that the organizers feel a smoke filled room is credible, or that banning talk of rockets would be productive -ignore the elephants in the room people. All the while an open forum becomes associated with riff-raff and lack of focus. How did we come to this? I suppose it’s like the restaurants discovering they sell more wine bottles when they raise prices. Who want’s cheap wine right?

    • kcowing says:
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      Inbred choir practice in an echo chamber for the usual suspects.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        It would be good, Keith, if you could be a bit clearer on how you feel about these gatherings? So we know how you feel? 🙂

  4. duheagle says:
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    A public on-line Humans to Mars event certainly beats secret doings in the VIP lounges, but neither are likely to be realistically dispositive of the issues involved. How we get to Mars will be determined by whomever has the resources to go. The odds of that person being in either the VIP lounges or chatting on-line with impecunious space cadets seem equally small.

    Near the end of his classic film The Wind and the Lion writer-director John Milius has Brian Keith, portraying President Theodore Roosevelt, say the following to a group of reporters:

    “Gentlemen, the fate of the nation will be decided by the voters in November. The fate of Morocco will be decided tomorrow by me.”

    Substitute Elon Musk for Teddy Roosevelt and Mars for Morocco.

  5. marcosanthonytoledo says:
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    NASA unfortunately since Apollo 17 has become a dog and pony show. As for man spaceflight do you really thing our masters what any of their property stealing themselves. So forget about Moon, Mars bases until further notice.

  6. ThraceThrice says:
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    Anybody noticing a parallel to obamacare? We voters are too stupid to understand space policy, so the Bill Nye and His Howling Planetologists figure to short-circuit discussion so they can get government bucks to do what they want. (And they can mumble about “private dollars” all they want, but everybody knows its government bucks, and government bucks going to their little club they’re after.)

    What is needed is not the smart-kids showing powerpoint slides to each other over and over. What is needed is some actual leadership — communicating why we should go to Mars to the average citizen/taxpayer. We don’t need to convince the already convinced. We need to fire the imagination. We need a “But why, some say, the Moon?” speech. You give the citizenry something interesting to do, and a good reason to do it, and they’ll bust a gut to help. Trying to sneak such a project past them is foolishness.

    You want a sample? OK.

    Why go to Mars? Because it’s there. Because at some point, we have to leave this planet, in the way our forefathers and mothers, and our brothers and sisters today, left the Old World and came to a place that killed many of them, but became a new home. Because we have a destiny in the stars. Because if we don’t go now, no one will ever go. Ever. We have to go. Now is the time. We have the ability to solve the challenges, to brave the dangers, to go to the other side of the planetary hill, see what is there, and make it a new home. Follow me.