BANGALORE, INDIA – Remember when the hot thing in Hollywood was’ Mars’ movies, a little like Mars Attacks; a lot like Red Planet.
Now we don’t need a scriptwriter to blow our minds with what’s happening here lately; did you see those pictures from the ‘Rover’? It`s drilling into the Martian surface signs of life under there?
There’s a sign we don’t have a monopoly with the red planet. India plans on sending up an un-manned spacecraft this year that will orbit about 310 miles away.
And then there’s that really rich guy; who is planning probably the most expensive vacation ever!
Multimillionaire Dennis Tito plans to finance a manned mission to fly by Mars and back in 2018.
Tito was the first space tourist. His ticket to the International Space Station in 2001 was 20 million bucks. It looks like Mars is in this spring. Forget going back to the Moon, and those meteors were so yesterday; so what does the “SciGuy” say about all this??
“It’s kind of almost like a gold rush in space…there’s a lot of commercial activity to be gained in terms of getting stuff in to orbit around earth, but the real prize is setting foot on Mars and so I think that’s the next competition we’re starting to see the beginning of that race and it’s gonna play out over the next 10 or 20 years,” the “SciGuy”, Eric Berger, of the Houston Chronicle.
All this info on Mars is great, but we do have to remember to look at the pictures. It’s pretty desolate and barren. Nothing like Earth’s bountiful landscape, which leads me to think we’ll probably never inhabit Mars and even if we did, we’d all be fearful of this happening…yikes! We’ll stick to Earth.
