Why is a manned mission to Mars in the next decade a great idea?

It will test our knowledge, our resourcefulness, and the limits of our abilities in every way. It will be risky, and yes, people will die. But in today’s risk-averse world, the value of a challenge has been grossly underestimated. As people become more and more “stay at home” and turn to ever more push-button solutions, we are losing our survival instinct. Existing and living to simply relax at home where it is safe is not good for any of us in the end.

In a world that is struggling with political solutions to big problems like the environment, hunger, poverty, and disease, we need a challenge like Mars now more than ever. We need to “sharpen up”, so let’s do something worthy of the effort, and something with the payoff equal to the effort put in. Mars, however we get there—be it a direct path or via the Moon, and with government programs or through private commercial space development—should be in our sights, for it has the potential to change our world in ways that we dearly need now.

From The Space Review here.

I think such a mission would produce significant and lucrative spinoffs in new science and technologies, provide a focus for a common human effort towards something truly grand but achievable, and fire up the imagination of the younger generation to what’s possible.