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NASA must ditch ISS to get to Mars: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin is of the opinion that the International Space Station should be run by private firms too.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and the second man in the world to visit Moon, is of the opinion that NASA should “retire the International Space Station (ISS) as soon as possible,” in order to launch a successful Mars mission. He was heard telling an audience in an event at Washington that ISS should instead by run by private firms as NASA can’t possibly afford $3.5 billion a year of keeping the organisation.

“We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost,” the former Apollo 11 moon-walker was reported by DailyMail as saying.

The ‘2017 Humans to Mars’ conference took place in Washington D.C, and was attended by numerous experts in the field. Buzz Aldrin was a key-speaker at the event wherein he revealed a few details regarding his long-term plan to get humans to colonise Mars.

“Let’s be certain that we’ve developed a sustainable plan to say on Mars. No flags and footprints this time,” he commented.

Aldrin further went on to say that companies like Bigelow Aerospace and Axiom Space should build more space stations.

Space.com claims that Aldrin’s ideas primarily rely on ‘cyclers’ — which are spacecrafts that move goods and people between two planets. He is said to be of the opinion that the cyclers will help the humans send a mission to an asteroid near Earth by 2020 and even fly to Venus by 2024. He hopes to complete the Mars mission successfully by 2030.

( Source : deccan chronicle )
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