quote:
But in a speech in Washington, DC, US, delivered in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary in 2008, Hawking focused on near-term possibilities, backing the space agency's goals of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and sending humans to Mars soon after that.The Moon is a good place to start because it is "close by and relatively easy to reach", Hawking said. "The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system," he added. Mars would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water, and the tantalising possibility that life may have been present there in the past.
...He also called for an acceleration of NASA's plans for human landings on Mars, which one NASA study suggested could be done in the early 2030s. "A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space programme and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s," he said.
Hawking made a pitch for human space exploration, rather than just sending robots to explore space, a position taken by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, among others.
"Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy," Hawking said. "If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before."
posted 04-21-2008 08:46 PM
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