CNN

this is, i would say, the most important issue of this election. it shows which candidate has the cajones to be a real leader. sure its expensive, but so is our military spending. id like to see those flip flop and lets see a mars mission 2016.

Space exploration is the only way to find other materials that we might need for future growth of Humanity. If we are to survive as a species, then we need be able to develop habitats that can survive in space; those habitiats can survive underwater as well as underground providing more places for people to work and live. It is the next logical step for us.

That is sad to hear that Republicans candidates to reject our last great milestone for our American civilization by sending humans to Mars. That result would be our hallmark of the end of American civilization. Our zenith of American civilization was in July 1969 when the first men landed on the Moon. Heavy oil dependence with rapidly eroding US dollars, outsourcing our manufacture bases and jobs, and sending troops overseas drained our American economy and decimated our financial resources available. Our today’s children will be their fate when the time of the end of American empire occurs. China will be the next world power. Eventually, China will conquer the moon within a decade and even, planet Mars within two decades. Politicians (both sides – Republicans and Democrats) never learn a history lesson because of their influence with enormous lobby supports for their own greed – money and power. The world solution will never materialize. In the near future our homo-sapiens will be the next species to be extinct just like dinosaurs that once roamed the world a hundred million years ago. Space colonization and Star Trek are only for childhood dream....

Don't worry, The funds for Mars exploration will be created out of thin air by another rate cut. Backed by "space related" securities.

Unfortunately most people who think the space program is money wasted in space (as if it's flushed out an airlock & not financing high skilled jobs that cannot be outsourced to another country) are just not educated about the facts. Bottom line is that there is no legitimate reason we should not be spending money on the space program. From advances in sciences, technologies, and seeding of new high skilled businesses/jobs, to the need to expand our resources and avoid the demise of humanity by having only one settlement of humans it all affects us. During Apollo the same people said it was money wasted in space so the program was killed and the hundreds of billions of today’s dollars went back into the system. It didn't make a difference. We have become a society of immediate satisfaction so when we talk about 10 year plans most people don’t have the patients for something that long or they hear 20 billion dollars and don’t realize that it’s spread out over a 10 year period. So unless it is a threat they want to spend the money on current in your face issues and not what will affect our kids and future generations. Ask yourself this, where is today’s binding vision for Americans? What brings us together under one dream no matter what our differences? Ask most kids what they want to be and you know there's an Astronaut in there. So as Russia and China all reach for the stars do we let them leave us behind while they become the new superpowers that we look up to? When have we become a nation of skeptics that says oh that looks to hard we shouldn't do it? If you want to complain about the money start looking at the billions that are wasted on pet projects that affect a small few and leave the hopes and dreams of our future generations in tack. For when the reach of our dreams no longer exceeds our grasp this nation will be doomed and remembered as just another Roman empire that fell into complacency and implode from within.

Mars doesn't have an electromagnetic/gravitational field as strong as Earth's to deflect away cosmic rays (remember the Van Allen radiation belts) which constantly bombard its surface. Which is why there is no life on Mars; any human on its surface would be dead in 2 weeks from full-body cancer induced by cosmic radiation...Which is why no space shuttle ventures past the Van Allen radiation belts: because they do not have sufficient shielding to protect living astronauts...Which is why we never really went to the Moon because it is scientifically impossible without (at least) foot-thick shielding. Unless, of course, we really DID recover UFOs from Roswell in 1947 and reverse-engineered the alien shielding solution...Which means, of course, that your government LIED to you somewhere along the line. Oh, that's right. YOU are the chumps who believed that only Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK..and that 9/11 was perpetrated by boxcutter-wielding camel jockeys..and that chads weren't really hanging during the 2000 election. WAKE UP, you morons!

I really get that space travel is an important part of our culture and life in the way of technology, I mean I love my cell phone and computer but in the future if giving up those things means the government will be able to support the elderly, homeless, save our planet, and educate our youth then I will do it, however we are not a country that as a whole is willing to do this and that I think is a much larger issue than space travel.

Anyone who says we dont have the money to send people to Mars, needs to look at the bill congress gives Bush every year for this occupation of Iraq! $5 billion for space exploration is about 100th of the cost of just a single year of occupation in Iraq!

we are already on Mars..it's just spelled IRAQ..unknown territory! shouldn't be there, shouldn't have gone there!!!
Ron Paul wants our troups home..or you can say Heil Hillary..your choice..

Space exploration is not done only when you have money. Money will be tight as always. What we need is vision to see us 20 years from now in space exploration.

Physicist Stephen Hawking said space exploration is a necessity for human survival. I believe he is right when we have religious fanatics trying to take us all with them to honor their god. But we will have to find another planet as nice as Earth in another star system.

Why, other than because they watched Star Trek and think space is cool, are so many people determined to spend billions of my tax dollars to go to mars...just to say we did.

If NASA can identify real, valuable reasons for future missions, that's one thing, but frankly, we've spent a ton of money on it and the most we can say for it is that we got Tang and Velcro.

Won't be a need. Mars will be here very soon.

Please, please, please... send Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, or Bush to Mars... but don't send oxygene... they've obviously proven that they don't need it to maintain their 'alleged' sanity.

NASA will not send any manned mission to Mars until 2030. Yes, that is true. Less than a decade after JFK's speech about putting a man on the moon, the first manned mission is a success. One of the reason why NASA got so much funding back than was because it was during cold war. After sputnik was launched as the first man-made object orbiting the earth, US tried their best to race the Soviet Union in space exploration, because of cold war. Funding is overflow for NASA, make the cost for human mission to moon easily paid. Today, NASA do not have many funding as much as the past during cold war, because it is not a race anymore. NASA also still need to design a spacecraft that could provide the astronauts that will go to Mars with human necessity, 6 months journey, 2 years exploration in the red planet, and 6 month journey back. Space shuttle are impossible because they are not even capable to go outside earth's orbit; so we will send the manned mission with rocket, like apollo missions. The plans to send a manned mission to Mars are two. From space station in Earth's orbit, or from the base at moon. The reason being is the power and energy that needed to escape earth gravity are so high. Therefore, we need to launch the manned mission from space station or moon base, where the gravity were much lower. In the future, there will be manned mission; Galilean moons (Europa and Ganymeade) and Saturn's biggest moons and the only known moon with thick atmosphere, Titan. The space exploration already started by sending a manned mission to moon. By sending a manned mission to Mars, we just take another great step for the mankind.

If we have megabucks to spend on rebuilding Iraq, we have megabucks to spend on our crumbling infrastructure AND going to Mars.

Hang up your cellphone and turn off your Internet if you don't want to continue to benefit from our space programs !

The question is will we still have an America in 2020?

Going to Mars would prepare and provide the technology innovation for the next 50 years. Manned mission to Mars can be done using the Mars Direct method with no return mission to the moon, and can be done in the next 10 years for far less than NASA will admit.

Space exploration may just be one of few options available to us as our planet continues to run out of sustainable resources. Instead of spending billions of dollars and wasting valuable resources on wars in a futile attempt to spread Democracy and American Christian values, - which, in effect, destroy any hope of an optimistic future, - we should dedicate more of our tax money to science and space exploration, as they may as well be the only means of survival in the near future.

Space exploration may just be one of few options available to us as our planet continues to run out of sustainable resources. Instead of spending billions of dollars and wasting valuable resources on wars in a futile attempt to spread Democracy and American Christian values, - which, in effect, destroy any hope of an optimistic future, - we should dedicate more of our tax money to science and space exploration, as they may as well be the only means of survival in the near future.

Like abortion, whether you like the Conferdate flag or not has nothing to do with running a country. It is just a piece of history like many things that have both good and bad histories about them, but are no longer revelant.

Tancredo hit a home run saying no to this guy!

As a card carrying Republican, I am ashamed at the comment regarding sending 'Hillary' to mars.
We as a party are beyond such statements, aren't we?

Who is this bozo? You think we have money for sending some reckless cowboy to Mars when we have bridges collapsing in Minnesota killing Americans and mines imploding throughout our country. We can't afford this right now.

I am one of the BIGGEST supporters of manned space exploration you will find....I used to "lecture" my Congressman Dr. Tim Roemer about its' value....he always voted AGAINST space funding.....thankfully, he always lost !.....too bad only two candidates got to respond....but at least we know we cannot count on Representative Tancredo !