In human history, the exploration of distant continents usually meant few return trips. And before too long, colonies meant some would never return to their home country.
PULLMAN, Wash. – It’s usually cheaper to fly one way, even to Mars.
Two scientists are suggesting that colonization of the red planet could happen faster and more economically if astronauts behaved like the first settlers to come to North America — not expecting to go home.
“The main point is to get Mars exploration moving,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University professor who co-authored an article that seriously proposes what sounds like a preposterous idea.
At least one moon-walking astronaut was not impressed.
“This is premature,” Ed Mitchell of Apollo 14 wrote in an e-mail. “We aren’t ready for this yet.”
Also cool to the idea was NASA. President Barack Obama has already outlined a plan to go to Mars by the mid-2030s, but he never suggested these space travelers wouldn’t come home.
“We want our people back,” NASA spokesman Michael Braukus said.
The article titled “To Boldly Go” appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Cosmology, which featured more than 50 articles and essays on Mars exploration.
Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, argue that humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth. They believe the one-way trips could start in two decades.
“You would send a little bit older folks, around 60 or something like that,” Schulze-Makuch said, bringing to mind the aging heroes who saved the day in the movie “Space Cowboys.”
(CNN) — More than 1,200 NASA workers will be laid off Friday, despite Congress passing a $19 billion budget for the space agency two days earlier.
Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, said Thursday she didn’t believe the bill would affect planned layoffs, “certainly not for tomorrow.”
Thursday was the last day for laid-off employees to report to their workstations. Shuttle workers on their last day were to receive their final paperwork.
Many of the departing workers have worked on the shuttle program since its beginning in the early 1980s.
Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.
One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded.
The United Nations has denied speculation that it is to appoint an astrophysicist as Earth’s representative to extraterrestrial life-forms.
Rumors had been circulating regarding the appointment of Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman – director of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs – to the role of ‘first contact point for aliens’.
