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Landing on Mars is the artifact of all of the innovation required to get to Mars. We benefit from the innovations, not the landing per se.

Memory foam, smart phone cameras, tech miniaturization in general, GPS, baby formula, cordless tools... just a tiny sliver of things we use daily that are directly attributable to the pursuit of space travel.

It is far from useless

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I fully support humans landing on Mars and large budgets but I don't think anything gets exaggerated in these discussions quite like the commercial technology ROI of space programs.

I totally agree. If the only reason to land on Mars were the derivative technologies, I would push for just working on those technologies directly.

And the public is not fooled. Whatever benefits they got from Apollo (Tang? Zero-G pens?) were not worth the cost. But no matter how long the USA lasts, it will always be remembered as the country that landed humans on the moon.

There may have been life on Mars. The day a human lands there, it will contaminate it. If we find traces of life after a human has landed there, we will never know if we brought it there or not.

This is a massive loss for real science.

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