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Cost $600 Billion to go to Mars. Taxes go down, edu. spending up, etc.

In 1989 NASA estimated that a people-to-Mars program would cost $400 billion, which inflates to $600 billion today.
Present systems for getting from Earth's surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending or other important programs--or by raising taxes. Absent some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck beholding the sky of another world. Yet rocks can be analyzed by automated probes without risk to human life, and at a tiny fraction of the cost of sending people.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993172,00.html#ixzz2C5GH2TmL
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993172,00.html#ixzz2C5G1XSaX
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