Anyone else excited that we are finally seriously working on going to Mars?

[Jon-Erich]

Baryonyx said:

It's probably a money-hoax.

USA is broke, fix the economy or it will collapse and drag the entire world down into a global depression and it's now obviously more important to travel to Mars instead... Am i the online one who can see the dilemma, the problem with this?

Keep on spending cash you don't have...

There are a lot of myths about NASA spending a lot of unnecessary money. To be honest, they never have. Between NASA's founding in 1958 and 2011, NASA had spent a combined total of just over $500 billion, or on average, $9 billion a year. That may sound like a lot until you realize that the Department of Defense spends about $600 billion IN A SINGLE YEAR. That's right, what the Defense Dapartment spent in a single year took NASA 53 years to spend that same amount of money. Even during the height of the Cold War, NASA never had a big budget and their budget now is a just a mere shadow of what it used to be. 

Also, unlike other government expenses, there has actually been a return on the investment in NASA. The American people have made money because of NASA. Also, entire industires have been created because of NASA. One reason you're using a computer today is because they needed a computer small enough to fit in a space ship. That's where the invention of the microprocessor came from. Not too many people were looking to do that back then and had it not been for NASA's interest in computers, we'd probably be half a century behind with our technology. 

So if you want to talk about going broke or fixing other problems down here, how about we pull out of the Middle East? How about we cut the defense budget in half? How about America stops policing the world. Then there's Social Security, which is also costing the tax payer a lot and is in the process of going bankrupt due to horrible government management. Or how about ending the war on drugs, a war that on average costs almost as much in a single year as NASA's current budget and unlike NASA, achieves nothing and makes things worse. In fact, while we're at it, we could also save $2 billion a year by getting rid of the DEA altogether.

So there's so much waste we can get rid of and we could have new roads new bridges, new schools, a better economy AND  our trip to Mars.