NASA: 'Water flows on Mars.'

Captain Patrick · Commodore Joined: 06 Mar 2005 Posts: 2421

Yeah my cousin works at nasa and i was spending the day with him today and we were talking about this, he was at the conference that annoucned this and i agree with him this is a major step for mars colonization but mars might be more viable since it has water but you can't just jump into something like that unprepared, we need to set up a base on the moon so we can get a feel what mars will be like when we leave our own back yard to say.

TrekkieMage · **Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:37 pm**

Distance is the main reason the moon will probably be colonized before Mars. We know we can get to the moon, we don't know if we can get to Mars.

Birdy · Socialist Joined: 20 Sep 2004 Posts: 13502 Location: Here.

Yeah, big news!
I agree with mage, maybe we should first look into the possibility of getting to/on mars, before we start debating colonizing it

Yeah, or the moon, first.
But, cool news.

PrankishSmart · **Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:43 am**

It's a matter of it there is resources at the moon usable or not I think. There is no point just having an outpost at the moon if their resources need to come from earth anyway, may as well just have the rendezvous at the ISS in orbit or something.

I think many more unmanned space vehicles need to be sent to the moon and to mars to explore these specific resources first and much more for this to become reality.

Hitchhiker · **Thu Dec 07, 2006 10:20 pm**

The problem with the International Space Station is that it's a huge, bloated, half-finished hunk of metal floating in orbit. :/

The moon has a lot of platinum, which is pretty useful (for example, for manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells). Plus it's a huge rock with tons of surface area for use, and unlike the International Space Station it doesn't cost any money to keep it in orbit of the Earth.

I'm all for going to Mars. But manned spaceflight has been sliding backwards for awhile now. The Moon is right on our doorstep, and I think it's inevitable that we'll have some sort of manned presence on it before we do the same with Mars, even if it's only a trial before moving on to the red planet.

webtaz99 · **Fri Dec 08, 2006 9:07 am**

I wish people would learn just a little about rockets, gravity wells, obital mechanics and stuff before spouting off about the Moon vs. Mars.

We will colonize the Moon, because it has resources for use in outer space which will be much cheaper coming from there than from Earth.

We already know how to make two very important things from Lunar resources that will benefit any attempt to get to Mars - oxygen and rocket fuel.

We will colonize Mars, because it has a much "friendlier" environment than the Moon, and presents a whole new world for Mankind to mess up. But it will be much easier to do using Lunar resources.