IT'S NOT ABOUT MOON ROCKS; IT'S ABOUT TANG:

 Working on colonizing Mars will encourage and deliver better, stronger, faster, and cleaner transportation technologies here on Earth, too. Scandalously, it still takes about as long to fly from New York to Los Angeles as it did when the hydrogen bomb was invented. I guarantee this will no longer be true once humans are cruising to Mars.

Doing the work of readying for Mars will organize the best of scientific thought and action around perfecting alternative energy, shifting from a subsidy model to one where fossil fuels are a bad or unnecessary option for millions of people.

And perhaps most significant of all, putting in the time and effort to prepare for a future with Mars will organize large-scale transportation and energy innovation in accordance with a new approach to climate technology. Climate control science should be a natural next step in our human stewardship of this and other planets -- ensuring stable futures for the flourishing of life.

Not enough people in Washington understand that the mission to Mars must be pursued as a mission to make Earth great again. "Astronauts want to go to Mars or the Moon or wherever," former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver recently sighed. "But why do they want to go there? We went to the Moon in the 1960s to beat the Russians and advance technology in the Cold War and be world leaders. But what's our reason now?" Instead, Garver wants NASA to focus on "technologies that are a real benefit to society."

But that's the thing. Mars tech and Earth tech are one and the same -- part of the same essential goal of creating a future many more billions of humans can love.

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