Steve Squyres: Robot Guy Says Humans Should Go To Mars

[bananas]

http://www.space.com/news/090715-apollo11-40th-squyres.html

Steve Squyres: Robot Guy Says Humans Should Go To Mars
By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 15 July 2009

Forty years after the first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969, SPACE.com asked Apollo astronauts and leaders of the space community to ponder the past, present and future. Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Project and a professor at Cornell University, is an avid fan of human spaceflight though he works on one of the most successful robotic missions to space, and is optimistic about humanity's chances of getting back to the moon - and even to Mars - in the coming decades:

SPACE.com: Did the Apollo mission have a big impact on you?

Squyres: Oh, yeah, of course it did. I mean, it was one of the key historic events of my formative years. And there are several missions I particularly remember. I remember John Glenn's flight very well, though I was only 6 years old at the time. I remember Apollo 11 vividly. I remember Apollo 8; Apollo 8, that was the first time that humans went to the moon, and I remember being at my grandparent's place on Christmas Eve, and then listening to the astronauts read from the book of Genesis. It was a very stirring, very moving sort of thing. So, yeah, I would say that all of those things captured my imagination, got me very interested in space exploration.

<snip>

Squyres: You know, I'm a robot guy, that's what I have spent most of my career doing, but I'm actually a very strong supporter of human spaceflight. I believe that the most successful exploration is going to be carried out by humans, not by robots.

What Spirit and Opportunity have done in 5 1/2 years on Mars, you and I could have done in a good week. Humans have a way to deal with surprises, to improvise, to change their plans on the spot. All you've got to do is look at the latest Hubble mission to see that.

And one of the most important points I think: humans have a key ability to inspire, that robots do not. Somebody once famously said, ' Nobody's ever going to give a robot a ticker tape parade,' and there's something to that.

Just drawing from my own experience, many of the other people who worked on building the MER rovers, and who work on operating them today, are people who grew up during the '60s, like me, watching Mercury and Gemini and Apollo on TV as kids and dreaming of sending spaceships to Mars someday. And now we do it.

And there's going to be another generation of kids that are going to watch astronauts go back to the moon, go to asteroids, go to Mars, and be inspired to do incredible things that we can't even dream of right now.

<snip>

[pokerfan]

1. What a Mars mission might look like

It could be accomplished with just two (Saturn V scale) launches...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JDHv3o7YNQ">The First Mission to Mars (video 5:20)

http://www.coe.gatech.edu/simplenews/downloads/Aug09AstronomyMagazineNextStepMars.pdf">Next Step Mars? (pdf from Astronomy.com)