Quote Originally Posted by space toker
yeah I would gladly go. I just hope they "get their ass in their hands" and spped things up. Supposedly we went to the moon a mere 9 years after Kennedy came up with the idea and we started from scratch, so you mean to tell me it will take until 2020 to go to the moon and 2030 or 2035 for Mars? IF we had planned for it, we could have gone to both last decade or before, and could still go by 2014 or so. Hell 2035, I'd be like 65 by then, I don't suppose they'd have any use for fuds unless they find a cure for the ultimate disease by then: aging/death. Eventually they may be able to take a sample from you and isolate your great-grandparents DNA and bring them back to life. So anything is possible.
At first I thought the same thing --- why could we go to the Moon in less than a decade starting from NOTHING, and now it is going to take so much longer to get the ability to go back when we already know so much more about how to do it? But the difference is that with Apollo, they were just proving the ability to go. There wasn't much capability beyond that. With this program, they want to have the ability to take much much more with them, set up long term bases, do long range exploration, reach other parts of the moon, and do it with a lot more safety built into the systems. This time they are going for the long haul, so it will take a lot more to develop the systems for that.

Also, the budget is nothing like what it was during the cold war. Once Kennedy made that commitment and basicly threw down the challenge to the Soviets, we would have paid anything to make it.

I wish we hadn't lost our way. We should have started a program like this decades earlier, and we could have bases on the moon and Mars by now. Looking back, it seems like the Apollo program is a little piece of the 21st century that was picked up and somehow trasported back in time to the 60's. Next year it will be 40 years since the first moon landing. and we won't be back there for another 10 years on the current schedule. Seems like 50 years is a long time to wait between getting there the first time and going back. Who would have ever guessed it would take that long?