And how big will the pants-shitting be in America if that does happen?
liek a 1/3rd of the country already thinks we faked the moon landing lmfao
The government will give Elon all the money to build the first slave colony on Mars, therefore "winning" the new space race. Luckily China will have already made contact with communist Martians who will liberate the slaves and give Musk the Total Recall treatment before liberating Earth.
Pffft my money is on China sending manned-missions to the North American Exclusion Zone within a decade.
Probably not since there is really no good reason for a person to be on Mars. Americans seem more apt to do an expensive thing for no reason.
I think the NASA answer to this question was they needed a machine more advanced than Curiosity for microbiological tests.
Not necessarily a practical reason from your persepctive, but that's the one given.
Oh, tbh I didn't even know China had a mars program I thought you were talking about Perseverance.
Thnx for the late followup, cuz now I'm reading up on the Tianwen-1 project
Well, since Mars is just 1 letter away from Marx and is known as the "Red Planet"
Mars won't be the only red planet in our solar system
More seriously though, sure it's expensive as fuck, but this is trillions spent at least on NOT making life hell on Earth. If the US just skipped out the whole Iraq War, we would already have a city on Mars and on the moon by now
I'm in team floating cities in the upper atmosphere of Venus. There's a part of the upper atmosphere there that actually is roughly earth like as far as being able to breath and shit goes. Having the one problem of cloud cities is actually easier than the myriad issues that come with making Mars useful.
I disagree. The only advantage is you don't necessarily need to pressurize your air habitat at 50-55km height since the pressure is survivable. But the atmospheric composition is similar to Mars with mostly CO2 with the added cheeky bit of sulfuric acid and it can get uncomfortably hot (50-75 degrees Celsius highs).
It would be like choking while there is a fog machine spewing acid in your flat during a heatwave.
A critical failure of a superstructure (Like on Cloud 9) or flotation devices would mean your base plunges 50+ kilometers into the dense broiling clouds of what is basically Satan's arsehole.
That's not to say that going to Venus lacks any merit however. When on route to Mars at it's aphelion to Earth, we could make a pit stop at Venus to idk, jettison Elon Musk into it. uwu
The XiLander will be touching down as Elon detonates his 1000th test rocket on the launchpad
If spacex's starship continues development well then they will probably be able to make it first, but if that doesn't work out then I could see China making it before the US.
