Just to please Philip I put this in another thread.
I just wanted to say that I think the plans to send manned missions to the Moon & Mars are stupid.
I believe that we should move forward scientifically. All the searching we do should be to add more and more tiny nuggets to the mountain of human knowledge.
Manned space missions are not the way to go about doing this.
For example, what did the Moon landings achieve? Ok, some dusty rocks that haven't really told us anything.
We know a fair bit about the Moon but we could have learnt just as much with a un-manned flights and a lot cheaper.
What's the point in going back to the moon? To scientists, it's boring, that's why nothing's been back there in 30 years.
Laurence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio said
Quote: "The Bush administration has caused a delay in important projects designed to do cosmology and astrophysics because of their desire to have humans orbit the globe and perform acrobatic feats, or whatever it is they do on the International Space Station. There is a place for manned space missions, but it's not to do with science."
Bush has severely cut funding for scientists and is now putting billions into this project which will ulimately give us nothing but the fact we did it. Whoop whoop.