That whole landing system has got Gerry Anderson written all over it. I guess the people who deisnged that system are the ones who designed the International Rescue fleet.

I read a post or tweet saying that its like a giant Rube Goldberg machine!

Also, iPhone auto correct has Rube Goldberg in it! Awesome!

The fact that it is basically a Heath-Robinson combination of disparate mechanisms appeals greatly to me. It's like someone got Pasticine, Meccano, Lego and Knex to all work together.

Yeah, but who gave you the figure? If it was a politician, you have to almost quadruple it; then claim you came in under budget.

We've given the banks £200billion (and counting). Our foreign aid budget has just been 'slashed' to £10b. We have the resources, we just don't have the people in charge who have the vision to do it.

Some of the recipients of that foreign aid have a space programme. So we are funding someones’.

Off topic but slightly related: Voyager 1 is close to leaving the solar system

http://www.space.com/16277-voyager-1-pr ... ystem.html

Which begs the question 'Why are we giving them aid?'

Because we are complete numpties.

To be fair that cost probably doesn't mean from scratch, it's probably only relevant to countries with fairly sophisticated space programmes and resources already in place.

I mean, we or the French could probably get a supersonic airliner going for a few million quid, whereas it would take another country much more.

Because aid programs are complex. India (the aid recipient with the space program) no longer really needs our support to feed the hungry, but we do still have role to play in their economic development for which we provide seed capital ( which generates a handsome profit - see Private Eye for the grisly details of that scam), and also for good governance initiatives, which they sorely need as in many areas they still have the lumbering old colonial era civil service we bequeathed to them, political cronyism, and widespread corruption on top.

Space programs are also complex, India thinks it needs one for poverty reduction, as it creates high tech industry and enables them to compete in the international markets for stuff other than cheap crap made by low paid coolies. Perhaps that's a less noble goal than sending a man to Mars for [LIFTED] and giggles, but those billions could also be spent wiping out tuberculosis, malaria or AIDS. It's just money after all, it has to go somewhere and do something.

IMO, it's about how long term you're thinking. The money could indeed eradicate some horrendous disease but it can't eradicate all disease and, frankly, I'm not sure we should do that even if we could. In any case, the simple fact is that at some point in the future we will wear out the planet we're on. The last oil will be pumped, the last gas deposit burned. At that point, assuming we haven't created entirely self-sustaining technologies, we're [LIFTED]. That point is not the point to suddenly decide figuring out how to get to and live on other planets is a good idea, we need to do it long before then, or we won't make it.

Shorter term (and by that I mean 'within the next 50 years') curing cancer or malaria is a very noble goal. But in terms of the future 200 or 300 years, if we haven't figured out how to go to space or how to preserve the Earth, doing that won't have done us a bean's worth of good.

We have a choice, IMO. We figure out how to live on this planet in an entirely self-sustaining way, or we figure out how to spread to other planets. Anything else, everything else other than that is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the global Titanic.

Jon

I'm given to thinking that if in 300 years we haven't worked out a better way to make energy than burning fossil fuels, then we won't have made much progress towards living on planets that don't have any.

Yeah, sure. If we pull a cheap stunt like comparing the cost of a space mission to the discretionary spending of two hundred million of people, then billions of dollars of government discretionary spending looks like a pittance.

There are charities raising billions from those same gum-buying people to fight AIDS and Malaria, feed the starving and so on. I'm not familiar with any that raises funds to support a manned Mars shot. But there's nothing stopping you from starting one up, as the guy says, in the context of private money it's not an either/or thing, you should be able to raise billions that way without seriously cannibalising Oxfam's revenue.

Government money is either/or though and that disingenuous blog won't change that. Government money spent on space is government money not spent on other things, and that's all there is to the matter. Your guy there thinks that space exploration is under-appreciated, and I don't dispute that. But my point is that so is developmental aid, and I'm not sure you disagree with me.

Was wiping out smallpox really an inferior achievement that walking on the moon? Even if it was, would using 1960s engines to propel a man to Mars be a greater feat than eradicating AIDS? Using chemical rockets to reach the red planet seems like ballooning across the Atlantic to me, it's just pushing an old form of transport to its limit; the finishing of an old journey rather than the start of a new one.