Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, shares his vision for the future of space exploration, in an article for August's Popular Mechanics but available now online. (Story via Republibot; click there for the executive summary.)
As I approach my 80th birthday, I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path. And that’s exactly what I see today. The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020—a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago. Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour. It will derail our Mars effort, siphoning off money and engineering talent for the next two decades. If we aspire to a long-term human presence on Mars—and I believe that should be our overarching goal for the foreseeable future—we must drastically change our focus.
See also: Why NASA is still playing catch-up to Star Trek and China.
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