I heard a caller to NPR this morning saying the mission to Mars was a waste of money to go and look at rocks. I guess that we are lucky that everyone in history has not felt that way about exploration. Crazy guys like Columbus, Lewis and Clark, John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong. I can certainly see his point, we are going to look at rocks, but we are there for so much more. What if we find something unexpected that's not found on our planet that helps cure cancer or HIV. Even if we don't find anything we didn't expect, just developing this project creates new technologies that are some of the the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance., or a first-of-its kind automated flight-entry system to sharply reduce its speed.
I know a project like this costs money, but I believe that missions like this on to Mars and past missions to the Moon have benefits, some that we see and some we don't, that far outweigh the costs.
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