Armstrong, regarding Mars:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP)—Neil Armstrong said Tuesday that a manned mission to Mars will not happen for at least 20 years—but the effort might be easier than what it took to send him to the moon in 1969.

The first man to walk on the moon noted that scientists must develop better onboard spacecraft technology and stronger protection shields from harmful space radiation before a manned flight to the Red Planet can be accomplished.

"It will certainly be 20 years or more before that happens," Armstrong said during a global leadership forum.

"It will be expensive, it will take a lot of energy and a complex spacecraft. But I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961."

He's quite right about that. What we lack right now is the will to go to Mars. Such a program is sure to be controversial, with lamentations for the money lost sending people to Mars--and what can people do that robots can't?--and how can we even think about messing up another planet the way we've messed up earth--and really we should fix all the problems we have here before going anywhere else.

We could go to Mars in ten years if we cared to. At present we have, I think rightly, other priorities. The question is whether we shall ever have a moment to take a deep breath, gather the necessary support, and begin the program.

And I think that it is vital that humanity go to Mars itself, rather than sending increasingly complex robots. An illusion, no matter how informative, is not reality. If we decide that watching Mars on TV is just the same as being there, walking on the red planet ourselves, we've lost all interest in the pursuit of truth--of experience as opposed to theory.

It's like trying to learn martial arts out of a book. You might have the motions right, but not understand their reasons. They are hollow, and any information we receive about Mars is hollow without real people there to explain it to us--a second hand experience, to be sure, but closer to reality than the images.

Only people can tell us the things that people would experience, and only people can place them into a narrative so that we can understand them. I have never been in a battle between Trojans and Greeks, but thanks to Homer I'm a lot closer to understanding that experience than I am to understanding what it means to be on Mars, efforts of Viking and Spirit notwithstanding.

UPDATE: Via Steve Bodio's blog, an Orion Magazine article on the same subject.