A better plan needs more money. To secure the money the US has to be filled with enthusiasm.

Not thinking outside the box. Thankfully Elon is. Hopefully, a few other engineers/businessmen will.

NASA has a $20 billion budget. WhatsApp cost almost NASA's budget. Uber is already valued at $41 billion. Apple earned $181 billion in fiscal 2014. Perhaps a half dozen companies will create a business around space and we'll have a trillion dollar space industry to augment NASA's puny budget.

My hopes are aligned with this.

I suspect that some of those companies will be run by people who got enthused by what NASA is doing now.

We've got plenty of plans -- let's pick one already!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manned_Mars_mission_pla...

A Manned Mars Mission has been 20 years out for 40 years, just like fusion power.

A manned Mars mission is within the grasp of existing technology (and has been for 40 years).

Fusion power isn't.

Mind that I'm not arguing for or against a manned mission to Mars. I don't think it would prove any tremendous benefits, though it would be most decidedly cool. I also believe that permanent or long-term Mars settlements are well beyond present technical capabilities.

But the difference here is political will and financing. Not underlying technical viability.

Speak for yourself. This is exciting. We have a plan. What we need is enthusiasm and funding.

I'm the guy who cut pictures of the Viking missions out of the paper when he was 10. I've seen lots of enthusiasm. The Shuttle, Skylab, Hubble, the Space Station, the Rovers on Mars, etc.

You are in an echo chamber of enthusiasm on HN. It doesn't translate to the rest of the America. We aren't going to magically triple NASA's budget because of enthusiasm. We canceled a larger supercollider more than CERN 20 years ago because it was a few billion over budget. We said Hubble or SSC, not both. It certainly would have been nice to learn 20 years ago what we are learning today.