SIGN THE PETITION!
President Obama: Set the Course for Mars
The American space program, begun and carried out so successfully during the Apollo era, has drifted ever since. Four decades of stagnation is enough. It is clear that if progress is to resume, NASA needs a goal that can mobilize and focus its efforts today in the same way that the reach for the Moon did in the 1960's. That goal should be sending humans to the Red Planet.
Mars is where the challenge is, Mars is where the science is, and Mars is where the future is.
While there are problems that must be solved, overall from a technological point of view, we are much better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to reach for the Moon in 1961, and we were there 8 years later. Given leadership willing to embrace challenge, we could have our first teams of human explorers on the Red Planet before the end of the next decade. We should settle for nothing less.
The American people deserve a space program that is really going somewhere. Therefore, we the undersigned urge President Obama to courageously embrace the challenge before us, and commit the nation to send humans to Mars before the end of the next decade.
Tell President Obama to Set the Course for Mars:
The Waters of Mars??
Mars Date Year 22823 Sol 62 @ 9:35 C~MEX Time Spring/Autumn
Sunday, 27th of December, 2009 CE @ 22:27 UTC Winter/Summer
Greetings Fellow Martians!!
Would you believe I got here by way of Doctor Who??
Doctor Who has an episode called "Waters of Mars".
Where did they get their scientific advisers from
Disney's Rocketman??
In 2009 CE the Martian time frame is
6 months going to Mars,
18 months on Mars,&
6 months going back to Earth.
Not "two years" just to get to Mars!!
And we wouldn;t be using a shuttle
especially since they are due to retire in 2010 CE!!
And we wouldn;t name the ship "Apollo 34"!!
Would you believe it has been over 50 years
since Werner von Braun outlined the first crewed missions
to Mars?? With 6 ships with 20 crew members in each ship!!
I;m somewhat ticked at NASA because they are using
"adjusted Martian time".
Every Martian day or "sol" is 24 "hours" long.
which means that there are 60 "minutes" in an "hour"
and 60 "seconds" in a "minute".
You can;t have a "Martian second" because
The Second is "... defined as the duration of
9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding
to the transition between two hyperfine levels
of the ground state of Cesium 133".
And how are we to keep Martian time??
We don;t have their exotic analogue watches
with "adjusted 24 hour time". Thank you.
All of our best to Marvin and K-9!!
Rally Cry
The last time the people of Earth were unified is when Man landed on the Moon! Almost one quarter of the population watched that historic event. Even crime dropped severely!
It's time for a new quest, and that goal is Mars.....
Humans whose souls are
Humans whose souls are weighed down by gravity need to stop destroying the Earth. Our future is in space! Time to leave this cradle!
Yes, we've been waiting for too long!
It's a mistery why we haven't gone to Mars yet. We have the technology, we have the resources, now we just need to put it up in our priority list to where it belongs to.
We want change!
I want to be part of it !
I'm 24 yo..young and enthousiastic..i want to be part of human exploration on Mars and beyond, come on, we have the tech, why are we here ??
Space was always and still is
Space was always and still is about politics. Almost nothing happens in space without political motivation behind it and it is very unfortunate that this is the way things work.
At the moment there is no political motivation to go Mars so we are not going despite all the benefits such a mission would have for all of mankind. Make Mars an issue of national security and we will be there in less than a decade.
Separate politics from space exploration
Most politicians don't know the difference between a retrorocket and a retrovirus. Therefore, few of them know about the vast benefits that space exploration can provide the people of Earth. For example, the unlimited natural resources of outer space. If humans are ever to get to Mars or remain in space at all, space exploration must be separated from governemnt, or politcians should be required to know far more about space exploration than they currently do.
Private space exploration is the way to go
I agree wholeheartedly that political interests (or, rather, disinterests have been a curse on space exploration. Had the Apollo program been continued, we would probably today have bases on Mars -- the Red Planet was a goal of the program. However, the U.S. having proved its superiority in space, the government abandoned its inspiring program for four decades of waffling and nothing. There was a reason that authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Ray Bradbury thought that humans would be on Mars in a couple of decades: the technology was in place. Today, a couple of interested high-schoolers with a computer could design a viable spacecraft to get us to the moon -- and private industry could build it, test it, and launch it in three years. Contrast NASA, which says that it will take them eleven more years to land humans on the moon, and the Constellation program has been going for four years now. It only took eight years to get to the moon in 1969, and we did not know a tenth then of what we know now. The government monopoly of space has been weighing down exploration outrageously for years; it is time for it either to end, or to shape up and begin a new golden age of exploration, thus ushering in untold advances and benefits.