Former astronaut doubts that NASA or SpaceX will make it to Mars

bgr.com

6 points·cpncrunch··7 comments

The article's headline (and much of the text) is pretty vague. The astronaut apparently doesn't think we will get there "soon" - whatever that means.

If we look at it in perspective of all 5,000 or so years or recorded human history, I'd say we WILL be there pretty darn soon. Just maybe not next year.

It'll either be soon, or never.

Not the headline. It actually says: "Former astronaut doubts that NASA or SpaceX will make it to Mars with their shiny new rockets"

Which is, of course, no surprise to anyone, lease of all NASA and SpaceX.

The title had to be truncated to fit HN (80 char max).

It would have been pretty easy to say the same thing in 1965 about the moon...

The environment in 1965 was completely different. It really would not have been easy to say we will not get to the moon in 1965, because there were strong suspicions that the Russians were already there. (And if they weren't, there were even stronger suspicions that they soon would be.) If you lived through the cold war, I'm probably triggering those memories for you right now. It was very much a time when the thinking was that it had to be done. (Right or wrong, that was the thinking, and those were the suspicions that existed.)

Besides, in 1965 Block 1 Apollo CSM was already built and being fitted for AS-201. (Apollo 1-A)

Who cares? Why are we supposed to be interested in why someone thinks (with no analytical insight to back it up) one of our brightest will fail? Everyone thinks Musk will fail at everything he does, yet here we are. Can we stop submitting articles reinforcing the notion?

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