Target Venus not Mars for first crewed mission to another planet, experts say

I've been wondering about the "experts say" part of a headline like this. Qualified people lending their opinion is an important piece of information to the context of the article, absolutely, but it also seems exclusive. It's not the opinion of the editorial board of The Guardian, however I also know for a fact that other "experts" would vehemently disagree. Would qualifying this as "some experts say" erode the confidence of the title and thus how sensational it is? Is it maybe implied in the framework of news titles that this is not a universally held opinion by "experts" so much as at least that of several?

I don&#x27;t get what the point is of a crewed flyby. The crew would just be cooped up in the craft the whole time with nothing to do except take measurements with instruments that could just as easily be done by a machine.<p>This isn&#x27;t the Apollo era, we&#x27;re pretty confident we can send spacecraft all over the solar system and keep humans alive in space for years.

A crewed flyby? What is the point of that? Colonizing the clouds of venus is a good idea eventually, but it&#x27;s certainly not a viable first target.

This was the original plan by Korolev and co, before the moon speech by JFK, and before the conditions on Venus became known. They wanted to figure out orbital assembly, and then circumnavigate Venus as the first step in the Solar System exploration. Hard to say how realistic it was, but modular orbital stations were an offshoot of that original vision, so it&#x27;s been partially implemented.

Clickbait headline -- the proposal is for a flyby, not a landing.

<i>“You’d be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission,” he said.</i><p>All of these &quot;Not Mars&quot; people always seem to fall into the same boat where they know there&#x27;s zero point to sticking human beings and life support systems into an observation probe so they trot out this &quot;it&#x27;s good practice, guys!&quot; horseshit. Scientific progress is not the point of putting the first set of boots on Mars any more than it was the reason for first climbing Everest. The point is to prove it can be done. <i>After</i> that you can quibble about the most efficient method of further human spaceflight development. It&#x27;s like they&#x27;re standing in the way of us learning to walk because they insist we figure out the best brand of shoe first.

We should seed Venus with microbs that consume amonia and the other chemicals on Venus, starting at least to make it habitable.

Why no stationary base on the moon?

A crewed flyby is barely more ridiculous than a crewed landing.

Yea, because we need more harder problems to solve. &#x2F;s

The title fails to mention that the experts in question were astrologists.<p>Not astrophysicists.<p>&#x2F;jk