I recently finished reading Zubrin's 'A Case for Mars'. He seems to do a good job laying out a plan for a relatively inexpensive and feasible Mars mission. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell he doesn't provide any actual incentive for going other than pure scientific research. Don't get me wrong, I fully support scientific research, but I can't help but suspect that we could learn a lot more useful scientific information if we spend Zubrin's $20-$30 billion on research initiatives here on earth. In terms of raw scientific data produced per dollar spent, I don't see how a manned Mars mission could be economically justifiable. Would spending $20 billion to go to Mars really generate more scientific advancement than giving $250 million to the science and engineering departments of the country's top 80 research universities? What about giving $250 million to the top 40 universities and then giving a $50,000 scholarship to 200,000 science and engineering students? You see what I'm getting at. Also, even if a manned Mars mission allows us to generate a tremendous amount of data on the planet's climate and geology, it seems as if it's sort of self-referential research; information about Mars is only really useful to people who happen to be on Mars, while basic physics, chemistry, and biology research is valuable to everyone, no matter what planet you're on. Other than scientific knowledge, I don't really see any reason for going. Zubrin talks a lot about how great it would be to establish a large colony with an industrial infrastructure, but this doesn't really seem plausible to me. Building any sort of industrial infrastructure on Mars that would actually be economically significant would be almost unimaginably expensive, literally orders of magnitude more than what Zubrin's plan would cost. It seems unlikely that any sort of off-earth industrial capability will ever be created until launch costs go way, way down. And even if we could build industrial plants on Mars, would we really want to? The cost of shipping anything back to Earth from Mars would seem to preclude profitably manufacturing anything on Mars for sale/use on earth. Why would we build something on Mars and ship it here when we could just build it here so much easier and more cheaply? Even if we ran into very severe resource depletion problems on earth, it's hard to imagine Martian manufacturing being economically feasible. So what does that leave us?
Well, the obvious question is, "Was the Apollo program economically feasible? Was the decision to go to the moon based on what we would get in return for our investment?" Obviously not, unless you consider Tang and shiny space blankets to be of inestimable value. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
