This morning I read an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute, those folks who look for extra- terrestrial beings in outer space. The point of his thesis was that the kind of space exploration done on Mars, namely sending robots and cameras, made more sense than sending people to outer space due to the cost and energy it would consume. His term for sending humans into deep space to explore was “a pipe dream.”
The technology, not yet developed, and the cost of fuel required, estimated at...






