NASA's Search For Vision

Senators spent the day explaining to Charles Bolden, the chief of NASA, that the agency needs to get it together. Bolden, always the defensive one, retorted that NASA does have a direction, and that direction is manned trips to Mars.

TAE asks the question again: once you get an astronaut on Mars, then what? It's not like the astronauts can stick around.
I don't really want to waste my time rehashing my arguments for robotic exploration of space, or with the obscene expense related to manned spaceflight. I'm not going to argue again that terraforming Mars before we get there is a much smarter, albeit more ambitious plan.

Instead I am going to suggest three "visions" for NASA to adopt:
1. Identify and harness Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
2. Exhaustively prove faster-than-light travel is impossible. Conversely, if a feasible method of FTL travel is hypothesized, aggressively research it.
3. Develop methods to identify currently habitable extrasolar planets and then start identifying them.

Any or all these goals could be successfully pursued, and aggressively, within the confines of NASA's budget. All are ambitious. All would yield significant and upheaving rewards for humanity if successful.


_