The Mars Society and The Enterprise Mission: A Short Review

After poking around both websites, I feel that they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

The Enterprise Mission website has a more flashy and commercial feeling. There are a lot of banners and graphics that are eye catching. But once you get past the bright colors and interesting fonts, you see that what they say isn't as impressive. All the website seems to reiterate time and time again is "[p]ublic understanding of major achievements of the Space Age over the past 30 years -- carried out by both the former Soviet Union and the United States -- increasingly seems to have been nothing more than a carefully constructed "version" of a much more extraordinary truth" or " Far more disturbing than this evidence (if it is indeed disturbing, to a generation raised on "Star Trek"...) is other, equally-documented evidence of a profound, deliberately politically-motivated cover-up of this important data by both major spacefaring nations... for more than 30 years". Basically, all its saying is that there is a lot of (government) opposition to finding extraterrestrial things (mainly living things) out in space. This sounds more like conspiracy theory jargon than anything. However, some of the external links contain less "conspiracy theory" driven information. A thing to note is a lot of the stuff on this website is older (from the late 90's). There are a lot of things that have changed since then.

Looking at the Mars Society website, just from first glance, this one has a more "educational" feeling. As soon as the homepage comes up, there are links to various articles, many of which are fairly to very recent. The downside is that you have to be a member of the website in order to read some of articles. After getting past the home page, you can see that there are some really interesting things to look at, such as the University Rover Challenge, the Translife / Mars Gravity Biosatellite, and the Archimedes Balloon Project. This website seems more of a place to get sources than to actually get information to use directly. They have an extensive list of external links.

The Mars Society website seems to be updated regularly as opposed to the Enterprise Mission website that has a lot of stuff from about 10 years (or more) ago. Although the Enterprise Mission website seems to be a little bit more one sided and very conspiracy theory oriented, it does provide places to get information to make your own conclusions. The Mars Society website I see more as a place to look for information (and articles!) instead of a place to get information. I like the fact that it is not as one-sided as the other website, but it lacks in the flashy eye catching stuff. I would probably look at this website for educational purposes only.