User:Marsbound2024

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Valles Marineris on Mars

A Bit About Me

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This user enjoys classical music.

ॐ	This user listens to Goa and psytrance.

Hello all, my name is John and I am a teenager who currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. I am a freshman at Case Western Reserve University. Anyways, I enjoy being an avid user and relatively steady contributor to Wikipedia and look forward to reading up on a variety of subjects each day during my free time. I find the wealth of information available to anyone and everyone to be an absolutely wonderful thing that is a good example of one of the positive aspects of the world wide web.

As you can tell by my name and the picture on the left, I am quite interested in Mars and the exploration of it. I hold no grandiose goals of actually visiting Mars by the year 2024 as I see that as doubtful, but it remains a dream shared by not only myself, but many. It is the most thoroughly explored world outside of our own and we continue to send our probes to investigate deeper into the planet's past. It's history is written in its geology and chemistry. Perhaps, hidden away in the ice of the poles, lie clues to early forms of life's building blocks that attempted to construct themselves millions or billions of years before. There is still much to learn about the planet. I am sure that current missions such as the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express, Mars Global Surveyor, 2001 Mars Odyssey and future missions such as Phoenix and the Mars Science Laboratory will help us come closer to finding answers. For now, however, let's learn more about myself, shall we?

1 Interests
2 Articles Most Interested In
3 Hobbies and Et cetera
- 3.1 Favorite Novels
4 2007 Budget is Short-Sighted

[edit] Interests

Orion Nebula

My interests are varied and could be considered boundless; however, my primary interests include:

[edit] Articles Most Interested In

[edit] Hobbies and Et cetera

Cast of Battlestar Galactica

I love art, music, writing, reading, learning about new things, meeting new people, hanging out with friends and going to get-togethers and small parties, watching movies and series such as Battlestar Galactica, photography, amateur astronomy, and much more. I would like to reiterate that Battlestar Galactica is my favorite series followed by the late Star Trek: Enterprise and the current Stargate SG-1.

As you can probably guess, I like to read science fiction, but I am not a big fan on things such as Star Wars, but instead more realistic sci-fi such as brought on by Orson Scott Card and Jack McDevitt. While one cannot truly make the statement "realistic sci-fi" non-oxymoronic, I do believe that I can at least attempt to back it up: Orson Scott Card writes about the social evolution of humanity in his works through the Andrew "Ender" Wiggin series while Jack McDevitt brings the reader into an exciting and believable set of adventures in which the character, Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, is the focal point.

[edit] Favorite Novels

Ender:
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

Hutch:
The Engines of God
Deepsix
Omega
*Have yet to read Chindi although have already read Omega. Long story short, I read Omega first thinking it was a stand-alone until I was already several pages into it--decided to finish it anyways.

[edit] 2007 Budget is Short-Sighted

Well I am outraged by the 2007 budget for NASA. Sure we are going to keep on track for returning humans to the moon and I am all for it, but not when it delays, cancels or "indefinitely delays" such milestone missions as a mission to Europa, a planet that likely harbors a relatively warm, subsurface ocean--which may in turn contain life, the Space Interferometry Mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder. These missions are vital for any space program with a vision. What President Bush gave NASA back in 2004 was nothing more than a focal point in which the agency is now putting the vast majority of its funds behind. We DO need to return to the Moon and humans on Mars is certainly important not only symbolically but technologically as well.

However, instead of delaying or cancelling missions of such promise and ambition, why not trim the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station which take up an unneccessary chunk of the budget. If it weren't for pesky politics we could do this... Unfortunately, we have promises to uphold and we all know how politics go. However, if we wanted to be rational we would save five billion dollars or so and divide the savings to development of the CEV, new technologies necessary for the Vision for Space Exploration, and not risk cancelling or delaying missions such as this.

Ironically, the Vision for Space Exploration called for NASA to "conduct advanced telescope searches for Earth-like planets and habitable environments around other stars."

Alright well we have Kepler on the job (though it has been deferred too, who knows what may come of it)... what about the hugely ambitious, more capable, and more promising SIM and TPF missions for the next decade, Mr. President? What? NO!? Then why make an announcement at all to affirm that mankind is truly interested in whether or not life exists elsewhere... which easily ranks on the top five questions mankind has to pose.

NASA and the Bush Administration: Oh and we are cancelling the most powerful science package ever sent to another planet...um...think it's called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter or JIMO. You may need to delay the James Webb Space Telescope, too. But don't kill the Hubble Space Telescope. No too many people have seen what wonders it can do and they want it to live. Yes we know that the missions we have cancelled and/or delayed would be on a scale much greater than even Hubble, but the percentage of the population who actually know they exist or how significant they are is minute.

Rational Person: Although Hubble is a great assest to the program and people do not want to see it die, perhaps we should save the one or two billion dollars that it would cost for the shuttle launch and servicing package and allocate it to missions such as the JWST? If money is indeed tight, this is perhaps the best course of action in order to prevent future, more promising science from being jeopardised. Furthermore, perhaps we should terminate the Space Shuttle and cut and/or reassign the jobs that go along with the program. It is aging, launching far below what it should be, costing around a billion dollars to launch safely these days due to the effects of the Columbia Accident and the CAIB report, and is not completely necessary to complete the construction of the International Space Station. You've already cancelled many parts of it already, so it won't hurt to take a few more. If you have to, launch the modules up by an unmanned rocket, use the ISS' Canadarm2 to grab it and then let astronauts do the rest. The costs of developing the software to aid will be far far less than shuttle missions. Also, we can still use the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get to and from the ISS. The Russians could use the money.

NASA and the Bush Administration: That will not do. Too much is riding on the ISS and we need an American craft to continue building it. It is unsafe to launch the modules up autonomously even though it is quite possible if we put our minds to it. The James Webb Space Telescope is still on track for keeping its scientific package even though we will likely launch it in 2013...

Rational Person: At one time it was thought it would launch around 2009 or 2010. Then that was pushed to 2011. Delays are nothing new to NASA and cost overruns certainly occur. With such an incredible feat of returning humans to the Moon, establishing a permanent presence on it, and going on to Mars within the first half of the twenty-first century, cost overruns are likely to happen as well. This may be your reason for cancelling and delaying science, but you cannot have a Vision for Space Exploration if the exploration of it is merely our front porch. Are you suggesting that we lower our eyes to the floor in cowardice from the infinite reservoir of knowledge that encompasses our insignificant cradle? The cradle of man. The cradle that has looked up into the unknown ever since man developed a higher intellect. Now, when some of us propose to give us the possibility to find out if there are others like us, we must turn our backs and say that the symbolism of man's footprint in the Moon is greater? That we must prepare the way for permanent presence on the Moon and secure the first step upon Mars' deserted surface? Yes instead of seeking out life we choose to explore where there is none. Maybe Mars has life, but if that is all we want to detect, we have probes for that. What is more symbolic and meaningful to the human race? The pride in knowing that we achieved a landing on the Moon...again...so that we could achieve a landing on Mars which is, at its closest, around thirty-five million miles away? Or, the humility and awe of discovering that life exists trillions, or quadrillions of miles away? That we are not so alone after all? Hell, we might could find this on one of Jupiter's moons--Europa. Several hundred millions miles away.

It is my firm belief that as a human race who strives to understand our very being that we pursue the exploration of the cosmos in a balance. Human exploration is important, but so is robotic exploration. The symbolism of human exploration should not devalue the signifcance of missions that give hopes to future generations... if anyone were to argue again what space has to offer us, all one would have to do is look up and point--even in a generalized way--and say the name of the planet on which life was discovered.

--Marsbound2024 03:10, 9 February 2006 (UTC)