Oh. So you consider Mars to be humans home planet?

We're discussing Mars.

And how many gubmint departments has a marketing/PR budget as large as NASA? The military is the only one that comes to mind.

I got another idea about NASA funding.

All your proving is that NASA has become one giant Hollywood production, financed by viewer appeal to selfie pics from astronauts.

FWIW, I have my own solution to the NASA budgeting problem. Instead of NASA having to go in and beg every year for money, we establish a baseline for their funding. Currently they get around 18 billion a year, but let’s be accommodating and set it at 20B.

All you’ve proven is that nasa is a giant bureaucracy who relies on marketing, PR , disco balls and smoke and mirrors to keep the future bucks coming in to pay their 18000 employees (40k if you count subcontractors).

Over how many hundreds of millions of years.

I’d love to see one thread on gizmodo about the necessity and future of manned space flight without a single reference to pop culture, Hollywood or science fiction.

I don’t include idiot responses like “humans will be eventually be annihilated on earth”.

We have Spirit, Opportinity and Curiosity, all they have is The Martian.

What exactly do we call Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity?

So you mean “feed the monkey”.

And not one poster has been able to effectively refute any of my opinions without resorting to personal attacks and science fiction references.

If we take the money we’ve already spent on the ISS alone, 200 billion, we could have at least 200 rovers on Mars (based on the cost of the Spirit and Opportunity missions, 2 billion) exploring every kilometer of the surface. Plus they could be there for up to ten years instead of the couple weeks or months of a…

And who terra formed Mars and seeded it with life?

And what is that? Pose for selfies?

Why should we continue to send people into space, considering manned space flight development and execution will eat up 90% of the budget, money that could be put to much better use actually exploring the solar system and not worrying about how we keep meat bags alive AND have to return them.

And we got all this science without a single human setting foot on Mars.

“Eventually we’ll need to leave Earth. Whether it’s due to pollution, a need for a resource we’ve used up, overcrowding, impending disaster, or some other reason, odds are that it will happen.”