First, the earth's spin imparts more initial velocity as you travel further south. Second, would you rather have an errant rocket hit the water (where it might be recovered semi-intact) or would you prefer said errant rocket hits someplace heavily populated such as Kansas City, Oklahoma City or Omaha? Third, the Texas coast actually gets more and worse hurricanes than Florida does because so many hurricanes get funneled into the Gulf of Mexico. Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall's.
Exploring is what we do and has been what we do since the first homo sapiens walked out of Europe and pushed its ancestors out of the evolutionary chase; look at the history of the 20th century to see what we've done to each other since we've run out of explorable territory. And it's not just about building intuitive rovers. Resource scarcity is something we will have to deal with in our lifetimes, as pointed out in this Slashdot journal and this Wall Street Journal item. We'll need people to find what we need and get it back here.Personally, I think that sending humans to Mars is a major waste of time. Or to the moon, for that matter. We have the technology to build very intuitive rovers. Why don't we just do that? It would probably be much cheaper, considering the fact that robots don't need food, nor a round-trip.
Our future is out there. Let's get going.
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