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What follows is my personal opinion. I understand that this topic is a quite controversial one, but it is time for a serious discussion about priorities, since the current world situation will not allow many more strategic mistakes. However my constructive critics are not intended to offend, and I highly esteem America and what it made in space, however the largest and most advanced space program of the world.
Forty five years after the historic landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, without forgetting the good Michael Collins, who waited patiently for them in orbit, NASA officially announced a manned mission to Mars by 2030. By this announce NASA expresses, at least, a large confidence in the availability of the United States taxpayers to keep on supporting the space agency’ programs, even beyond the “low cost” policy, to which many today charge the responsibility for the space program’ failures and delays.
I take the freedom to applaud the NASA plan with several reserves and no little suspicion. Perhaps, when President Bush announced in 2004, the famous manifesto “Moon, Mars and Beyond”, did he aim to propose and consolidate, in fact, a methodology, more than a plan? Such methodology had already borne fruits, excellent for bureaucracies, but harbingers of stagnation and deepening global crisis for the entire human community.
To put it more explicitly: 1) what else does NASA space program include, before 2030? and, 2) what does NASA plan to do after the Mars mission, provided that it will develop and will be successful?
It is precisely the lack, once again, of a global vision, that raises my eyebrow. After the “conquest of Mars” NASA will sit for another fifty years on “laurels”, enjoying gifted public money?
Who does assure us that the 2030 Mars mission is not simply a way to revive a NASA strategy equal to the one of the last 45 years, dedicated solely to exploration and scientific research, and yet rigidly and stubbornely closed to the industrialization of the geo-lunar space, use of asteroids resources for the construction of the space infrastructure, a true expansion of civilization beyond the now narrow boundaries of our planet?
It should be clear, nowadays, even outside the international space community, that if the high frontier had been opened to privates thirty or forty years ago, as it was quite possible, likely today the global economy would be growing at double digits, and this horrible crisis would have been avoided. The fundamental question then is the following one: do they finally understood the lesson, or not? Did the space agencies finally understand their deep social responsibility, toward the civilization?

Should the announced program had made the mission to Mars as a spearhead of a true expansion and colonization plan, I’d applaud without reservation! A space program coherent with the current state of the world should definitely claim the leadership of a new industrial development, with primary emphasis on the construction of an orbital city, located at a Lagrange Point between Earth and the Moon, permanent stations on the Moon, to extract and process raw materials, capture near-Earth asteroids in order to use their raw materials, mainly virtually pure minerals. Not to mention that, in a contest of the world economy strong expansion, thanks to the development of civilian astronautics, both the Mars mission, and especially the subsequent initiatives for permanent settlements, would be much more sustainable. Meanwhile, the Twenty First Century Space Program should accelerate the development of Earth to Orbit fully reusable vehicles, develop orbital workshops and interchange stations, orbital hotels, to accommodate a growing population of space workers. And, also, to push hard the accelerator on studies for protection from solar heavy radiation and on the bio-technologies needed to sustain life in artificial environments. Should the NASA program include all of the above, the Mars mission would not appear as yet another “cathedral in the desert”, designed solely to seduce the taxpayers desire for adventure, keeping them well-chained to their seats, watching space exploration on TV … or , paraphrasing the much more poetic Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the theater of opera in the middle of the Amazon rainforest!

More and more we feel like the poor geese, nailed to a wood plank, to harvest the fois gras …

Meanwhile, in absence of a genuine ethically superior initiative, opening the frontier and achieving new resources, the terrestrial conflicts increase, rather than decrease, and not only in pre-industrial countries, but also in the heart of Europe.
And the stench of death rises beyond the bearable threshold, especially for those who love the wide spaces and freedom …