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It's America's 'Manifest Destiny' to Plant a Flag on Mars, Trump Says
- johnneville 2y agofull section: "In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier, America’s manifest destiny in the stars. I am asking Congress to fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and the first woman on the Moon will be American astronauts — (applause) — using this as a launching pad to ensure that America is the first nation to plant its flag on Mars. (Applause.)" https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-state-union-address-3/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
- dekhn 2y agoThere is nothing about going to mars that is consistent with governmental efficiency.
- verdverm 2y agoAn administration efficiently returning money to a specific vendor who gave $250M to their campaign, if one wants to be cheeky?
- reaperducer 2y agoAn administration efficiently returning money to a specific vendor who gave $250M to their campaign, if one wants to be cheeky It's the most efficient way to find out how much it costs to rent a presidency. And it's super-efficient for the president to outsource his job to someone from overseas.
- hindsightbias 2y agoI support any amount needed as long as Elon is First Martian.
- reaperducer 2y agoThere is nothing about going to mars that is consistent with governmental efficiency. But it sure is consistent with securing mineral rights for your company.
- coldtea 2y agoYeah, but compared to some of the stuff the gov cummulatively spent trillions on, this is more efficient than Tim Ferris on speed...
- fddfhj 2y agoWell a worthy long term plan to save the planet is to ship all the celebs, podcasters, influencers and general attention craving specimens out of the solar system.
- Dig1t 2y agoGenuinely curious how you feel about the Apollo missions. Do you think they were bad or that it would have been better if we had not done them?
- dekhn 2y agoFrom the perspective of propaganda and establishing US dominance (responding to USSR's impressive gains), it certainly had value, and it's an epic thing that stands as one of humanity's greatest technical achievements. From a scientific perspective, I don't see it as tremendously better than having done a robotic exploration, except that at that time, we didn't really have the knowledge or technology to build complex semi-autonomous vehicles that could return samples. I know folks have argued that having a geologist physically on the moon made a difference but I don't see that as sufficiently impactful. Other folks will argue that in addition to the direct scientific achievements of apollo, running the project generated a wide range of side technologies that had much wider applicability, but IMHO, those things probably would have been invented (or other things invented) by non-space funding for materials science. While I generally think sending any human into space (LEO or elsewhere) is a waste of time and money, if I am speculating about a science fiction future, I think it's imperative that humanity become multi-homed (fully independent settlements) but as a species we don't have the political will or resources to achieve that.
- bediger4000 2y agoTrump says all kinds of things, baseless things, unsupported things, and he says contradictory things, flip flopping, as it were. Why hasn't the media learned in the last 8-9 years?