ot: 1 min of silence

[El_Phil]

Hope I'll give you. I think we can discount the ESA, lets be honest they do struggle to get a rocket working properly. Chinese who really knows?

But we are talking a massively expensive project with no real benefit. There's almost nothing you couldn't get out of unmanned missions that a manned mission could do. I mean before attempting anything manned virtually bullet proof tech. would be needed, so just stick that in an unmanned probe and you slice costs by several orders of magnitude.

I think the moon race sums it up, the US loafs up there and.... Doesn't send men back because there's no reason to go. The moon race at least had the vauge justification of beating the Soviet Union, advances in missile technology, etc.

The only reason to go to Mars is the prestige or because its there. Hell of a reason for spending trillions of dollars.