Manned Mission to Mars

NASA has been planning Mars missions for the last 40 years. This is nothing new.

The problem is, that each new government administration decrees NASA to plan for this or that, the next administration scraps it, forcing NASA to change its goals and sights.

Given the shifting history of NASA I am suspicious about NASA achieving anything of significance for a very long time.

The golden age for NASA was the 1960s.

From 1961 to 1969 NASA went from the first suborbital manned flight to the surface of the Moon and back.

That was done with slide rulers, by the way.

Contrast that with the last 10 years. We can't even get a man back into orbit and cancelled the Shuttle and the Constellation lift systems.

So, yes, there is a lot of planning going on, but it shifts like smoke in a wind storm and any real progress is pitifully slow. The technological means is there. We simply lack the will and the funds to do anything.

After the next presidential election it is almost certain that another seismic shift in planning will take place.

Hire J J Abrams to do the Mars landing on a sound stage on the Atacama. It'd save us all a bunch of money and he can get it done a lot sooner.

...and, be sure to have Matt Damon act the leading role (wink,wink)!

Regarding Mars, NASA and Elon Musk each have their own reasons for wanting to go to the Red planet.

Only Elon Musk is destination-driven. NASA is not, which is why NASA has been literally going around in circles for the past 17 years, -in low Earth orbit.