The whole space program is nothing more than a government works project for scientists. The only practical outcome so far is the bar code in use today.

"Steve-2555576

"That is great. I hope they spend all of their GDP to get to a place that has almost no atmosphere and is colder than Antarctica. Hopefully we will be smart and steal all of their developed technology and use it for our benefit."

Oh wait... They did that first, too.

Everything China makes you can buy at Wal Mart and if you think Wal Mart and the space program belong in the same sentence you can dream tourself to mars. China is a junk factory.

Here's my prediction: there will never be a manned mission to Mars or any other planet by any country. Why not? Because by 2030, at the rate that technology is advancing, unmanned probes will be able to accomplish anything that people can do safely and at a fraction of the cost of a manned mission to Mars. Space is too big and too difficult for humans to travel through for manned interplanetary exploration, not to mention interstellar exploration. Our country should continue it's focus on advanced technology. That's the real future. If the Chinese want to blow their surplus on a manned Mars mission, let them.

It never fails to amuse me about all the "experts" that contribute to these comments. The night side of Mars is NOT "just above absolute -0-" (zero, I presume). Mars currently is at least as stable as Earth. And when the Sun does go out, keep in mind that Mars, being further from it than Earth, Venus, and Mercury, will NOT be the first planet to go in the explosion, which is currently theorized to be several BILLION years from now.

Also, by the way, the Space Shuttle has only failed TWICE in over 100 flights. (AND, in both cases, the shuttle itself was NOT to blame. It was bad decisions by NASA admins that caused both accidents.) Not bad for the very FIRST RESUABLE spacecraft in the world, eh? Not to mention the most sophisticated spacecraft ever built, and the very first to glide back like an airplane instead of splashing down in an ocean or landing on hard earth. More airliners have failed in their first 100 flights than Space Shuttles have.

Statistically, Apollo was worse, because two failed out of 17, one still on the ground (Apollo1) and one in space (Apollo 13). I didn't hear people calling for the end of the Apollo missions because of those two failues.

One more thing - before you criticize something, at least have the decentcy to get the FACTS about it first. NASA is now enjoyng a healthy INCREASE in their budget, thanks to the current Administration. They are now freed of a FAILED booster design that the previous NASA Administrator could not let go of, as it was his idea. Ares1 was far too underpowered to lift the Orion spacecraft into LEO. The Orion design team was being forced to cut their design of a robust spacecraft that could have gone to the Moon, to Mars, wherever, into one where the crew was cut from six to four, and those remaining four would have only 1 PINT of water to live on a day. Not to mention the loss of the dry land landing option. Shameful! Now, the Orion will be redesigned, and NASA has the funding to develop a NEW, powerful booster to get us into true exploration. And they have the backing of the US Government to do it, where before they had yet another "unfunded mandate".

For goodness sakes, people, get the FACTS BEFORE you open your faces!

It is red.lol

America has been there and done that, hurray for China though. We have probes still sending photos and data back to earth, some at the edge of our universe. We use probes like we use drones, we don't have any lives to waste, you can replace machines but never a human life.

It is possible to get to Mars first...if that is what is priority. Using a version of the Vasimr plasma rocket engine. This motor has a possibility of 123,000 mph...arriving at Mars in just under 40 days. Powered by hydrogen and heated by nuclear reactors with the resulting plasma directed by superconducting magnets to produce thrust could be the answer for interplanetary travel. Face it...conventional burn and coast rockets are not the answer. This engine would be at power through the duration of flight...and be able to turn around for a return to Earth if needed. Until a rocket capable of lightspeed or "warp" is invented...the Vasimr is probably the only way to go fast enough for a successful mission beyond the Moon.

Privatize space exploration and whoever gets there gets the gold so to speak.

If getting to Mars is priority...perhaps the best way would be to use the Vasimr Plasma engine. Using Hydrogen fuel heated by nuclear reactors and directed for thrust by superconducting magnets, in theory, could propel a space vehicle to speeds upwards to 123,000 mph being able to reach Mars in 40 days. Conventional burn and coast rockets will take up to 6 months for a one way trip. Another advantage is constant power which could turn a ship around for an emergency return to Earth. Soon there will be a small scale test on the ISS. This is the tech of the near future until lightspeed or warp technology can be achieved. If we hope to go beyond the moon...plasma is the power.

This is just a display of Chinas rising power. The Chinese don't need this, but they are using it to establish themselves as a world power, just like they did with their naval fleet back in the days of dynastic rule. If the Americans are smart they will see China and Russias new alliance along with the other BRIC nations and see a threat to her power. The United States wont be the crown jewl of the earth for very long, the Chinese soon will be.

The Americans wont be able to compete with the Chinese during this chapter of space exploration. With the new economic crisis the U.S. is having domestic problems, and is too preoccupied to deal with space. How to you think the public wll act if they learn the United States is spending billions of dollars on space exploration when they are in the worst financal crisis ever.

To sum this up the China is rising and the United states is falling. The world economy more controlled by the Chinese every day, and markets are moving to China. By 2027 the Chinese wll have the biggest economy in the world and will reach a position as the most powerful nation on earth. With her BRIC(Brazil, Russia, India, China) allies the Chinese will form a new dominant global alliance, more powerful than NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The people just dont get it...

If the Chinese were concerned about things like world hunger, they'd probably be heading for Sirius.

I don't give a darn as which race of human get "boots" on Mars first. Growing up in the 60 

The USA is bankrupt and cannot afford any grand missions to anywhere.

I will be very pleased to see any progress toward landing a human on Mars. So it may come down to kissing so Chinese ass to see if they will bankroll a joint mission to Mars.

They are definitely looking forward to domination in space, after all it's the ultimate high ground. He who owns space owns the world. I wonder how many decades before they have their planetary-bombardment bases set up on the moon?

I hope they take most of Congress with them - and leave them there!

HA HA HA! Did all of you you get abducted and anally probed. Can u say "PROPOGANDA". I knew you could.

You're all comedians...right?

Will Chinese restaurants on Mars have multi-lingual menu's?.What a great place for an international prison for those with life sentences.Donald Trump also has plans for Mars.Place an elastic cord from Earth to Mars along with solar panels to speed up global warming.If they dig deep enough they could find plastic bottles.All kidding aside we have so much to learn about our solar system.

Leave the soil there. Don't bring back any would-be Martian creatures.

Leave the Martian soil there. No need to bring back any potential Martian cooties. We have enough on Earth as it is.

Why would someone want to go to Mars ? It's a dead place.

stop wasting money sending probes to nowhere land.

I would basically like to see almost everything beyond Earth orbit done in an international project way. Space can potentially become the great unifier of mankind, if we approach space in the right way. The only safe way to send people to Mars is with the benefit of massive shielding in order to protect them from cosmic and solar radiation (as well as meteorites), and if we are to have a properly shielded space craft, then we will really need to build it as an international project in Earth orbit over a period of a decade, hopefully using the ISS as the future construction platform. This reusable international solar system exploratory ship should be capable many deep space missions around our inner solar system in the coming decades, if it is properly designed and assembled. Doing these kinds of things in an international way should make space exploration affordable for everyone, and we should be able to reap huge benefits from these kinds of joint international projects when it comes to the future unity of mankind here on Earth. - Rick Carter

I think it is revealing that the quoted statement by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is preceded by this caveat:

Although my visit did not include consideration of any specific proposals for future cooperation, I believe that my delegation's visit to China . . .

[SOURCE: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=31926 ]

With or without the caveat, the statement suggests a hint of progress, but I continue to be less than impressed by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's suggestion just before the Fourth of July 2010 that the "foremost" mission of NASA is to "make Muslims feel good about themselves", which apparently now has been extended to include making the Chinese feel good about themselves, too . . .

And I have big problems with two very important words--specifically, "belief" and "fact", where on the one hand it is a key aspect of being human to have beliefs but on the other hand science operates best when it is based on facts . . .

When people engage in discussions about things which should be obvious if anyone took a moment to use a bit of common sense, one of my strategies is to inject a fact, which nearly always is an outstanding strategy, because in great contrast to beliefs, it is virtually impossible to argue with facts . . .

For example, how can anyone argue with the belief that Jesus arose from death three days after being crucified and then after a patently surreal Last Supper with his Apostles went to live in Heaven with God and the Holy Spirit?

One either accepts this belief based on faith or one rejects it, but regardless of whether one accepts or rejects it, there is no way to determine whether it actually happened based on indisputable facts, at least until more information becomes available, which for the most part will need to be something that clearly and indisputably rises to the level of being a miracle or at least some type of Divine event . . .

Personally, I am firmly on the accepting side, and I can imagine quite a few plausible explanations based on various aspects of quantum physics, but I also am convinced that the aliens from outer space--who at this very moment are circling the planet in low-Earth orbit while they search frantically for the Mirror Matter Popcorn™ they "misplaced" while on what they imagined would be a happy picnic in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico in the 1940s--regularly beam me instructions for composing silly DISCO songs like "I'm Going Goo-Goo For Ga-Ga", which is the current song I am developing for The Surf Whammys, my pretend Rock and Roll musical group, which is fabulous . . .

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo-Goo-Over-Ga-Ga-10-25-2010-MP.mp3

Fabulous!

And in this particular instance, the fact of the matter is that the Chinese are going to Mars, which probably includes manned missions, sooner or later, because doing manned missions to virtually anywhere is a clearly established way for a nation to gain literally stellar stature on this planet, as well as being perhaps the only practical way to gain overwhelming dominance in high technology at least for half a century, which is the way it worked when our great nation decided to do manned missions to the moon, which for the record took less than one decade start to finish at a time when there were no personal computers, iPhones, iPods, and a lot of other high-technology stuff . . .

In fact, the primary reason that personal computers, iPhones, iPods, and so forth exist is the direct consequence of the single-most limiting factors in rocketry, which to be specific are space and weight, which for the early space program mapped to making vacuum tubes extraordinarily costly both in terms of their physical volume and their weight . . .

And while all I can do is guess on this particular aspect, intuitively it appears likely that in great contrast to NASA "misplacing" the blueprints for the rocket ships used for the Lunar Missions of the 1960s and early-1970s, the Chinese probably kept their clandestinely acquired copies, hence do not need to start entirely from scratch . . .

From yet another perspective, the Chinese have a significantly huge problem with respect to having a virtual festival of highly educated youngsters who engage constantly in a variety of social networking activities, some of which at times likely border on anarchy, so another fact is that history makes it abundantly clear that doing what appears to be a nearly insane manned space program at an accelerated pace is an extraordinarily successful way to divert the attention of bright, literate, and numerate youngsters from making political and social trouble to making spaceships and exploring the universe, which is the way it works even when there is an ongoing war, because for example the reality in the late-1960s and early-1970s was that watching televised visits to the moon was a lot more interesting than wandering around carrying "Stop the War" signs and all that nonsense . . .

But perhaps most importantly, the primary reason for doing manned missions to Mars has nearly nothing to do with spaceships and exploration, strange as it might be . . .

The primary reason for doing manned missions to Mars is to reap the benefits on Earth that come directly and indirectly from solving the myriad problems associated with sending humans on a multi-year flight through outer space in the most hostile environment this side of the surface of the sun . . .

For example, the reality in the late-1960s was that if one were involved in an automobile accident essentially in the middle of nowhere, then (a) someone had to walk to a nearby farm house to get to a telephone to call an ambulance, and (b) when the ambulance arrived it was staffed by one or two drivers who probably completed a Boy Scout First Aid course but basically just put everyone with injuries on gurneys and then drove to the local emergency room without doing much of anything beyond basic first aid . . .

However, as the direct consequence of NASA solving the quite complex problems associated with dealing with medical events when the astronauts were in flight to and from the moon and simply could not go to a local emergency room, everything changed dramatically over the next decade as all the various newly devised technologies transferred from NASA to everywhere else, and today instead of Billy Bobby and Scooter arriving in a 1967 Chevy station wagon with a big red light and a spanky siren, a state-of-the-art emergency response vehicle arrives with highly trained paramedics, advanced onboard real-time telemetry, a virtual festival of medicines and medical devices, and so forth and so on, where additionally as a direct result of lessons learned in the Vietnam War there also are readily available helicopters with complete medical and surgical crews for those times when the medical realities do not allow a long ground trip to the local emergency room or must be handled by a regional trauma center . . .

From this perspective, it at least is possible that some key bit of hithertofore undiscovered knowledge about the human body will be discovered as the direct consequence of solving the myriad problems posed by extended spaceflight to and from Mars, as well as doing on-surface visits and establishing research stations, both in Mars orbit and on the surface, and this particular bit of knowledge might provide the solution to the most devastating disease experienced by the people of this planet, which to be precise is accelerated aging . . .

More specifically, no matter how one views the Bible, it provides a bit of historical information, and while the state-of-the-art with respect to technology probably was not nearly so advanced several millennia ago, I think it is reasonable to suggest that people were able to keep track of such things as minutes, hours, days, nights, seasons, and years, which makes the accounts in the Bible of various key figures living hundreds of years and in a least a few instances of becoming fathers when they were approximately 700 years-old quite plausible in the grand scheme of everything . . .

It might appear to be a bit wacky to think that people should be able to live healthy and product lives that span 500 to 1,000 years, but there is a bit of anecdotal historical evidence for this hypothesis, and I allow the possibility that some adverse event occurred thousands of years ago--perhaps before recorded Chinese history, which puts it at least 10,000 years ago--and this adverse event somehow altered the genetic algorithms of perhaps most, if not all, of the humans on this planet, where on the more curious side of the hypothesis I allow the possibility that the adverse event did not affect every person at the time, hence there might continue to be a few people on this planet who actually live healthy and productive lives in the range of 500 to 1,000 years, which if nothing else is somewhat supported by a virtual festival of what typically are a combination of conspiracy theories, legends, and fascinating folklore and stories . . .

Designing and building the various rockets and spaceships is not the problem, since there is plenty of readily available technology for doing the various vehicles . . .

The difficult aspect is solving all the problems associated with providing a safe traveling environment for the astronauts, which among other things must include self-contained and self-sufficient full life-support, food, medicines, surgical theater, and so forth and so on, which is a nearly mind-boggling set of requirements . . .

And the first step is quite simple, since it involves setting the goal, which mostly is a matter of leadership and common sense that has not occurred on this planet since President John F. Kennedy did it in the early-1960s . . .

Another fact of the matter is that if you are reading this, then you probably are reading it on a computer that uses technology which is the direct consequence of the aforementioned physical "space and weight" restrictions of spaceflight . . .

It might have happened sooner or later, but because of the NASA Lunar Missions of the 1960s and early-1970s, it happened sooner, which is a fact and is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :)

 They're going to have to steal a lot more stuff before they can do that.

We could spend on space exploration, health, education, and infrastructure just a fraction of what we spend on wars and rebuilding other nations, not to speak of all the unaccounted corruption slush funds of the pentagon, and already be on Mars.