Humanity has long dreamed of personally visiting the Red Planet. For this, a large-scale preparation is being carried out and various options for how to do this are already being modeled and planned. However, not everyone shares this enthusiasm. For example, Bill Anders, one of the first people to participate in missions to the Moon, said in an interview with the Air Force that sending crews to Mars is "just ridiculous and a stupid idea."
Bill Anders (full name William Alison Anders) of the Apollo 8 crew, which also included astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, took off from Cape Canaveral on December 21, 1968. This was the first manned launch of the three-stage Saturn-5 launch vehicle. The flight to the moon was just over 66 hours. Having entered the lunar orbit, the ship made 10 flights around the Earth's satellite, after which it went back. At that time, it was the farthest place in space that humanity could reach. This record was broken only by the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Now the former astronaut speaks rather coolly about how NASA developed after fulfilling the promise of President John F. Kennedy to land a man on the moon.
Anders is also critical of the decision to focus on exploration of near-earth orbit after the end of the Apollo program in the 70s and considers the Space Shuttle program a "serious mistake."
Speaking to BBC reporters, Mr Anders said that sending crews to Mars is "ridiculous." At the same time, one of the first people who traveled far from Earth does not at all say that we should not strive to know the nearest planets. We're just going in the wrong direction. Mr. Anders believes that we need to first create the necessary technologies to allow humans to land on Mars in the future, but it is still possible to study the planet without personal presence.
Bill, by his own admission, is a big fan of unmanned programs because they are, quote, "much cheaper." He believes that, unlike the Apollo program, there is simply no such level of support right now to fund more expensive human missions.
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Bill Anders did not disregard the ambitious plans of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to colonize Mars, saying that there was "unreasonably much hype" around these plans, and called the ideas themselves "nonsense", again referring to the lack of the necessary technologies.
Vladimir Kuznetsov
