little guy on mars
Jan19-05, 09:33 AM
We will eventually have to send human beings to Mars because the space community needs the glory of landing a human on another planet (for all the media attention that brings) and for the more practical purposes of experimentation since we may have to terraform some other planet in the future.
However, unlike many, I think most missions in space should be done by machines as does this board's namesake. It's cheaper and safer. Sending people up to the space station all the time is not producing any fantastic breakthroughs. Until travel in space is closer to flying in a plane (i.e. a little artificial gravity), Joe Q. Citizen cannot live in space or travel for extended periods.
In the meantime, machines can do this work and as for their longevity, it seems that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are long outlasting their predicted productive life on mars.
(has anyone seen the commercial, shown mostly during the superbowl, of the guy in NASA who falls asleep at the console while monitoring the rovers and a car alarm sounds and he looks up to see creatures running off with the tires of the rovers? LOL)
On the subject of Administrator Sean O'Keefe's early retirement from NASA.. Richard Hoagland was probably not the first person to wonder why someone would stay in such a cool job for such a short period of time. But upon closer inspection of the situation, I guess most of us would leave our jobs if we were asked to work somewhere that we would make around 3 times our current salary. None of the news reports say whether he had applied to this job or if they just asked him out of the blue.
Anyway, I thought he was doing a great job. For someone who probably didn't know jack about astronomy when he started, he learned very quickly and has gotten NASA some much needed funding.
There is the one issue of astronaut John Young being upset that O'Keefe didn't do enough for the safety of the astronauts. That's a natural argument and I wouldn't expect an ex-astronaut to be any less concerned for the welfare of current astronauts. But I suppose O'Keefe did all that he could to solve the inherent problems that come with trying to operate within a bureaucratic agency and I wonder if this very issue might not be one of the reasons that he and Ron Dittemore (after working there almost 20 years) stepped down.
Looking to the flipside of space travel, What's the forecast for private companies doing space exploration and space tours?
However, unlike many, I think most missions in space should be done by machines as does this board's namesake. It's cheaper and safer. Sending people up to the space station all the time is not producing any fantastic breakthroughs. Until travel in space is closer to flying in a plane (i.e. a little artificial gravity), Joe Q. Citizen cannot live in space or travel for extended periods.
In the meantime, machines can do this work and as for their longevity, it seems that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are long outlasting their predicted productive life on mars.
(has anyone seen the commercial, shown mostly during the superbowl, of the guy in NASA who falls asleep at the console while monitoring the rovers and a car alarm sounds and he looks up to see creatures running off with the tires of the rovers? LOL)
On the subject of Administrator Sean O'Keefe's early retirement from NASA.. Richard Hoagland was probably not the first person to wonder why someone would stay in such a cool job for such a short period of time. But upon closer inspection of the situation, I guess most of us would leave our jobs if we were asked to work somewhere that we would make around 3 times our current salary. None of the news reports say whether he had applied to this job or if they just asked him out of the blue.
Anyway, I thought he was doing a great job. For someone who probably didn't know jack about astronomy when he started, he learned very quickly and has gotten NASA some much needed funding.
There is the one issue of astronaut John Young being upset that O'Keefe didn't do enough for the safety of the astronauts. That's a natural argument and I wouldn't expect an ex-astronaut to be any less concerned for the welfare of current astronauts. But I suppose O'Keefe did all that he could to solve the inherent problems that come with trying to operate within a bureaucratic agency and I wonder if this very issue might not be one of the reasons that he and Ron Dittemore (after working there almost 20 years) stepped down.
Looking to the flipside of space travel, What's the forecast for private companies doing space exploration and space tours?