Apollo 8 astronaut: Sending people to Mars would be stupid
Bill Anders, who is famous for the “Earthrise” photo which is the first ever picture of Earth from the orbit of the Moon taken by men, critized Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on their highly ambitious space exploration projects. Anders also believes NASA is not ready to go back to the Moon and there’s not enough public support for it.
Bill Anders, who reached to the orbit of the Moon 50 years ago and took the photo of Earth’s rising over our satellites orbit has made serious criticism on space exploration projects of private aerospace firms as well as NASA.
Talking to BBC Radio 5 Live for the new documentary about Apollo 8 mission, Anders said that “it is not actually fun to make space travel and not so exciting to go to the Moon.” While talking about how hard is space travel, Anders argued that NASA should be spending its budget on other things instead of planning a manned mission to Mars.
“What’s the imperative? What’s pushing us to go to Mars? I don’t think the public is that interested,” said Anders and added that public doesn’t even interested in going to the Moon, which is true. According to Pew poll of 2018, only 18 per cent of US citizens think going to Mars is important, while 45 per cent say that it is lower priority. 37 per cent of Americans on the other hand, think it is unnecessary to go to the Red Planet, as Elon Musk is committed to make real.
You would think that Mars is bombarded with high radiation of the Sun and too far away and public’ opinion is not surprising. But general view towards going back to the Moon is almost the same as Mars for Americans. Only 13 per cent say that it is imperative, while 42 per cent think it’s lower priority. For 44 per cent, it is not important.
“Mars colony is nonsense”
What Anderson underlined in terms of space exploration is very important because many people are supporting the idea of “expanding the lifespan of Earth” instead of colonizing Moon or Mars. Some people support the idea that space agencies should be spending their budget to help the environment more than building spacecraft to explore deep space. Some scientists on the other hand, like NASA’s Umut Yıldız thinks that the budget of the weapons industry should be downsized and allocated for environmental projects.
Anders, is supporting the unmanned Mars missions in this concept but thinks going there is just a fantasy. Plans of Elon Musk’ SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are hard to believe for him.
Frank Borman: “There’s a lot of hype about Mars that is nonsense, Musk and Bezos, they’re talking about putting colonies on Mars, that’s nonsense.”
Commander of Apollo 8 mission, Frank Borman supported Anders on his thought about deep space missions. According to him, you will just puke all the way getting there to only see a “devastation”, “meteor craters” and “no color at all”, just different shades of grey.
Reminding us that the Apollo missions took place in a era of extreme competition against the Soviets, Anders believes NASA couldn’t go to the Moon today. “They’re so ossified… many of the centres are mainly interested in keeping busy and you don’t see the public support.”
Depite criticisms from Borman, Anders remained supportive of NASA and said “we need robust exploration of the Solar System and man is a part of that.”
It is hard to know what Elon Musk would think and if NASA would re-evaluate its robotic missions to the Moon after Anders’ comments. But space exploration is already a huge industry and it can not be limited when there are so many ambitious entrepreneurs like Musk, Bezos and Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson.
Sources: IFLS, Sciencealert, DijitalX
