A pretty amazing thing might happen tonight on Mars

[93Devil]

If you are into space travel, this is pretty damn interesting.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57486458-76/watch-nasas-live-coverage-of-mars-rover-landing/

Watch the youtube video and that will give you a better idea of what they are trying to pull off.

 

[Killick]

Fingers crossed for a three-titted Martian hooker.

 

[NDub]

This is very interesting to me and I'm hopeful nothing goes bad during the "seven minutes of terror."

 

[TigerVols]

I'm a nervous wreck about this...a bad result would give the NASA-haters in Congress a pretty sharp sword to swing on future budgets.

Plus, this thing is California-made, so I'm cheering for the home team.

 

[Stoney]

.a bad result would give the NASA-haters in Congress a pretty sharp sword to swing on future budgets.

Which might not be a bad thing. Given our current financial plight, Mars landings ain't exactly the wisest allocation for billions right now.

 

[TigerVols]

Nasa's budget is .53 percent of the entire US Federal budget.

Find somewhere else to cut, not somewhere that employs thousands of high-tech jobs that aren't being shipped overseas and that do prove on a daily basis America's scientific prowess.

 

[WriteThinking]

That is amazing. Pretty hard to look at some of that scenery, think how it looks so much like some canyons and desert-type areas on Earth, and be able to believe that there is no life there.

I was just imagining the silence, with nothing but that robot on the planet. And the early scenes from space really do give a sense of a big universe out there, not just a big, wide world...

Just fascinating. I've always thought and lamented that I was born a few generations too soon. I would love to be around if/when space travel ever becomes something more regular and for more regular people.

It's also hard to look at and experience all that and just talk about something as practical and mundane-seeming as jobs being the main reason to do it.

 

[TigerVols]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

 

[WriteThinking]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

I know. You're right, and it's too bad.

They need to look at and watch more of this kind of stuff. If you do, you get it, and you're likely to get on board with it. If not, you just go with what you know, and take a short-sighted view, and in that, money is everything, unfortunately.

 

[Stoney]

If you asked people in 1980 whether we'd have a colony on the moon or Mars by 2012, I'd guess the consensus would be, "Yes."

Sorry to keep playing the grumpy guy, but what would be the point of a colony on the moon to justify the insane expense? If we're gonna allocate that kind of public money toward scientific pursuit, perhaps it would be better directed toward curing diseases or other areas that would actually impact the average American's life beyond "oh, wow!"

It's not "world without wonderment" that has impeded NASA's progress--we've still got an awe inducing plentitude of wondrous research in other scientific and tech fields--as much as it's today's economic reality. In the 50s and 60s our govt could afford to chase the moon because we had our fiscal house in order, we balanced our budgets, and had the extra bucks to spend. Now we don't. When (or if) our disastrous budget/debt situation is ever cleaned up, that's when we can renew talk about colonizing the moon.

 

[da man]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

Not a Tea Party/Republican thing. Democrats have cut space funding and Obama administration is very much behind the current (and very conservative-sounding) trend to privatize the space program.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0213/Obama-to-slash-NASA-budget.-Will-space-exploration-suffer

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/04/60-minutes-highlights-obamas-broken-promise-on-space-program-jobs-paging-bill-nelson.html

From a July CS Monitor story:

President Barack Obama's federal budget request for 2013, which was unveiled in February, keeps NASA's overall budget flat, at $17.7 billion.

But the request cuts NASA's planetary science funding from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion, with further reductions expected in coming years. The space agency's Mars program gets hit particularly hard, with funding dropping from $587 million this year to $360 million in 2013, then falling to just $189 million in 2015.

As a result, NASA is scaling back and reformulating its Red Planet exploration strategy. The space agency has put together a committee called the Mars Program Planning Group, which is assessing possible future missions to Mars.

NASA also withdrew from the European-led ExoMars mission, which aims to launch an orbiter and a rover to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

ExoMars is viewed as a key step toward sample-return, which the U.S. National Research Council identified last year as the highest-priority planetary science mission for the next decade.

Many researchers believe that sending pieces of the Red Planet back to Earth is the best way to search for signs of Martian life. But sample-return would almost certainly be a multibillion-dollar flagship effort, putting it out of NASA's reach in today's budget environment.

"There is no room in the current budget proposal from the president for new flagship missions anywhere," Grunsfeld said shortly after the budget was released.




FYI, Obama took a lot of heat from former astronauts for eliminating plans for the Constellation manned space program a couple years ago.

 

[Starman]

The end of the manned space program is the successful execution of the 'starve the beast' strategy.

NASA's budget has been cut on a percentage basis every single year since 1969, with only a few very brief-blip exceptions.

Also, replacement launch vehicles should have been developed after both of the Shuttle disasters, in 1986 and 2003. The administrations at the time failed to do so.

The current priority for the space program is to privatize and militarize it, to divert financial resources to that sector.

Manned space flight has no prospect for immediate or even foreseeable-future economic payback. Manned space flight from now on will be predominantly military.

 

[Yodel]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

Usually the ones attacking the NASA fund aren't Bible-believers, either. Plus, nothing discovered by NASA discounts the Bible. It is eternally true.

 

[Starman]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

Usually the ones attacking the NASA fund aren't Bible-believers, either. Plus, nothing discovered by NASA discounts the Bible. It is eternally true.

Yeah, but the ones attacking the NASA budget are usually the "i don't wanna pay no ******* taxes for nothin' " screamers, of which there is a huge overlap with the Bible-flogging crowd.

Plus the dyed-in-the-wool anti-science yuk-yuks, who occupy a huge amount of media attention as well as essentially the endorsement of an entire network that all this stuff is weirdo pencil-neck-geek stuff we shouldn't be spending any money on.

 

[TigerVols]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

Usually the ones attacking the NASA fund aren't Bible-believers, either. Plus, nothing discovered by NASA discounts the Bible. It is eternally true.

I'm sorry, but this is just flat-out wrong.

 

[Starman]

Anyway, let's hope this mission lands successfully, because most likely there won't be any more coming any time soon.

 

[TigerVols]

Those of you on the East Coast planning on staying up late to follow the action...might be disappointed.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/nasa-rover-curiosity-aging-satellite.html

 

[Batman]

WT, agree whole-heartedly with your last point; however, the forces massing to cut NASA couldn't care less about big-picture, human-endeavor kinds of arguments. Mostly because every scientific advance puts another chink in their Bible, they are hell-bent on killing it off under the guise of "it's a waste of taxpayer dollars!"

Usually the ones attacking the NASA fund aren't Bible-believers, either. Plus, nothing discovered by NASA discounts the Bible. It is eternally true.

Yeah, but the ones attacking the NASA budget are usually the "i don't wanna pay no ******* taxes for nothin' " screamers, of which there is a huge overlap with the Bible-flogging crowd.

Plus the dyed-in-the-wool anti-science yuk-yuks, who occupy a huge amount of media attention as well as essentially the endorsement of an entire network that all this stuff is weirdo pencil-neck-geek stuff we shouldn't be spending any money on.

Bull****.
Complete and utter bull****.
The biggest anti-NASA crowd are the "We should spend that money on earth!" brayers. And most of the time the stuff they want to spend the money on are the same sinkhole social programs that never generate anything but a warm and fuzzy buzz for their supporters.

 

[Starman]

The idea that money chopped from the NASA budget was going to be diverted to social programs went down the toilet in about January 1969. It goes to the Pentagon. Or to tax cuts.

 

[TigerVols]

So, the GOP House leadership wants to spend money on earth?

http://www.spacenews.com/policy/120509-nasa-budget-takes-hit.html

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives on May 8 cut $126 million from NASA’s Cross-Agency Support account and transferred the funds to the Justice Department, shrinking the House’s proposed budget for NASA to $17.447 billion for 2013.

When debate began May 8 on the $51.1 billion 2013 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act, NASA stood to receive $17.57 billion next year — a $226 million cut that would receive the agency with its smallest budget since 2008.