The Future Of NASA

Neil DeGrasse Tyson sounds like my drinking buddy this weekend:

He sees this "force of nature" firsthand when he goes to student classrooms. "I could stand in front of eighth-graders and say, 'Who wants to be an aerospace engineer so you can design an airplane 20 percent more fuel-efficient than the one your parents flew?' " Tyson says. "That doesn't usually work. But if I say, 'Who wants to be an aerospace engineer to design the airplane that will navigate the rarefied atmosphere of Mars?' because that's where we're going next, I'm getting the best students in the class. I'm looking for life on Mars? I'm getting the best biologist. I want to study the rocks on Mars? I'm getting the best geologists."
But spending for space programs isn't where Tyson would like it to be. In just one year, Tyson says, the expenditure of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to NASA's entire 50-year running budget.
"I think if you double [the budget], to a penny on the dollar, that's enough to take us in bold visions in a shorter time scale to Mars, visit asteroids, to study the status of all the planets," he says. On Venus, for example, scientists have observed a "runaway greenhouse effect," Tyson says. "I kind of want to know what happened there, because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it."
Today, Mars is bone-dry; it once had running water. "Something bad happened there as well," he says. "Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughing stock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case."

Actually, my buddy was making the case that his daughter (my Goddaughter) was going to be an astronaut establishing a space colony on the moon or Mars or some other place to save the human race.  I argued that considering the support system on Earth that would be required to support life in space, we were much more likely to save the human race here than there.  Tyson seems to split the difference and says we need to find out what happened on Venus and Mars to prevent the same things from happening here.  I just don't think manned flights to Mars are feasible, and if they were, they wouldn't be a good investment.  I think the current program of unmanned probes and space station experiments is a pretty good investment.