Is a Mars mission going to happen? As soon as Mexico pays for the border wall.

[Jilly_in_VA]

President Donald Trump says we’re going to Mars, but don’t start packing your bags just yet. There are a lot of reasons to doubt that his plans will get us to the Red Planet, and he may even put us further behind schedule.

In his inaugural address Monday, Trump said the country would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars” and “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

It’s an ambitious goal and one of the few he’s laid out for his second term that has broad support. In a 2023 poll, 57% of Americans favored sending astronauts to Mars, making it much more popular than Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 participants, attempt to overturn birthright citizenship and proposal for broad-based tariffs on foreign goods, all of which majorities oppose.

But other than that single sentence, almost everything Trump has said and done indicates that a trip to Mars is about as likely to happen as Trump’s broken first-term promises to repeal Obamacare, make Mexico pay for a border wall and guarantee six weeks of paid family leave.

In that term, Trump also said America would go to Mars, signing legislation that directed NASA to plan a mission that would launch in 2033. But he was so blasé about his own proposal that he apparently forgot about it when holding a video chat with an astronaut that same year, then got annoyed when she noted that the Mars landing wouldn’t happen before he left office.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-elon-musk-mars-plan-rcna188973

When pigs fly.

[exboyfil]

1. Not convinced we will even have a manned moon landing by 2033

Let alone Mars. Just like commercial fusion, a Mars landing is just 20 years away.

[Swede]

2. "We'll get over it."

What do Mexicans say when asked how they feel about Trump's wall.

[hunter]

3. Musk the grifter king has convinced the fuckwit king to give him even more of our tax dollars.

People are going to die in this pointless pursuit.

[exboyfil]

5. They will probably rob the unmanned missions which are far more

effective at collecting scientific information. As far as Mars goes, its only real interest is the possibility of detecting life (either current or past). The jackpot would be living examples on non-panspermic life - that would revolutionize everything. Otherwise it would be great to know (panspermic life or fossils). I think we could do all that exploration with robots and AI. We don't need boots on the ground on Mars.

[Hugin]

4. The Stars and Stripes has been on Mars since...

July 20, 1976 with the Viking 1 lander.

Y’know, it’s probably still there.

Probably.

[exboyfil]

6. What blows me away is that the life experiments yielded ambiguous results

And we haven't come up with landers to perform those types of experiments which are less ambiguous.

[Hugin]

7. Good point.

I’ve always taken that to mean that all of the precursors to life are present on Mars. The reasons life isn’t readily detected is due to an abundance of things that are damaging to life such as ionizing radiation and a lack of things beneficial to life like a liquid water cycle.

Presently.

[Klarkashton]

8. The moon landing brought significant technical advances

This time the rockets look like steampunk props and burn fossil fuels.

It's an ersatz dumbed down version of the 60s.

I might add that the Chinese just leap frogged AI sending shockwaves through the markets. Hahaha.