Another Martian rover—this one with the wildest landing routine since Mack Senett did films…
Martian Rover: even NASA calls it scary: the equivalent of dropping a Yukon on Mars
Another Martian rover—this one with the wildest landing routine since Mack Senett did films…
Martian Rover: even NASA calls it scary: the equivalent of dropping a Yukon on Mars
hooray! Downbelow station is up on Audible! am downloading as I type 😀
got in before you did, and therefore am in the wrong post, but never mind, I’m very pleased .. 😀
lol—I added the other, thanks to your note above.
You cannot succeed epically unless you strive epically. Even if you fail, it is still better than to have done nothing at all.
I still do not understand the people who complain about spending money on space exploration. These are the same people who use their iPhones, iPads, PCs, digital cameras, and other miniaturized devices to “share” these complaints. They don’t get the connection between space exploration and technology, not to mention all of the medical technology that has been advanced by NASA research. 50 years ago, during the beginnings of the Gemini flights, would we have been able to visualize CT scans, MRIs, what about nanotechnology for medicine?
As Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said, (paraphrased here) We have lost our initiative, we are no longer the leaders in space exploration. We go to the International Space Station, we stay in Low Earth Orbit. We boldly go where everyone else has gone, too. We are a one-planet species, it only takes one asteroid to wipe out the human race, along with every other species on Earth. Do we just wait for our extinction passively, and leave no trace that we ever existed?
My word for these people is—uh, we didn’t send that money to Mars. There aren’t any restaurants or tire stores on Mars. We paid American workers who went to restaurants and tire stores in Alabama and Florida, Texas and Oklahoma and California and…
And the things they discover will enable OTHER American workers to go to restaurants and tire stores and pay the baby sitters, and MAY even provide information for doctors who will save your grandma’s life with what they learn.
When DH and I got to go to the last space shuttle launch, the weather that week was very dodgy. In case the launch was rescheduled, we got a hotel in Titusville, a nearby town that is essentially the support community for Kennedy Space Center and related operations. It was a ghost town; every other business was shuttered or for sale, as the Space Shuttle wound down with no replacement coming in. With all those KSC engineers and other personnel being laid off, it sent a real shock wave through the area. Who says your NASA dollars don’t have local effects?
“I resemble that remark.” I worked at North American Rockwell’s Space Division where the Apollo Command Module was built in ’68. So did Dad. 😉
I don’t agree with war, but I work for U.S. Army. The drawdown, which hasn’t affected the military members yet, has seriously affected the civilians and contractors who work for the Department of Defense. Our economy is going to get worse before it gets better, because we are throwing people out of jobs, not hiring for existing jobs that are vital for continuing to upgrade our military materiel, and losing the experienced employees who can get employment elsewhere. That all takes jobs away from young people trying to get established. Now is the very last time we should be cutting jobs from the Fed Government. If nothing else, start something along the lines of the CCC.
I absolutely agree. Fund the daylights out of science AND engineering. We’re going to pay for this if we don’t move to an INTELLIGENT leftward—not more social service, but EDUCATION of our young people to their highest potential. The theorists that say that American economy is going toward ‘service business,’ —translation, burger flipping and providing consumer goods—and a business model that has eliminated warehouses (read: made physical books impossible to stock) by keeping goods in trucks in transit (read: our stupid tax gurus decided to levy a destructive tax on goods in warehouse even if held year after year) and used computers to produce close to the transportable number—is bozo. If a nation doesn’t push science in its schools, if it allows religious nuts that believe the world was created 5000 years ago because some Irish monk with a quill pen did the math to prove it—to kick science out and keep youngsters aimed toward absolutist and ignorant—we’re going to waste the efforts of our forefathers and bumble much more slowly toward the future in which we may actually fragment, because we’ve forgotten how to negotiate.
WRT the economic crisis: a few years ago when everybody was talking about “events”, I was saying, “Wrong! It’s not an event but a process, not a dip but a spiral! We haven’t seen the spiral once around yet. There’s more to come.” We’re seeing the second time around now.
WRT reactionary backlash from the “red states” and elsewhere (Middle East, anyone?): I recommend going back to read Toffler’s “Future Shock”, 1970. The clearest trend of history is the constantly increasing rate of change. (A function of information flow, i.e. transportation?) Integrate the rate of change over time and when you get to some fixed number all empires fall! There’s only so much change empires, or people, can tolerate without collapsing. Our current rate of change over a period of a few decades is more than many (unprepared/uneducated?) people can tolerate.
Americans seem to be like Seabiscuit; they do their best when competing against someone. The last time we kicked it up a notch was when we started the space program back in the 50s and 60s. Having the Soviets be first in space got our dander up, and the end result was a lunar landing. I don’t know what the next Big Goal should be, but we desperately need one. Maybe we should rebuild our infrastructure, which hasn’t been seriously overhauled since — you guessed it, the 60s.
on a different topic: has anyone seen this yet?
http://leapmotion.com/
Back in the 60’s we used to see the truly bewildered with bumperstickers saying “Stop the world! I want to get off!” The rate of change was getting to them THEN. My worry is that it’s a vulnerable and emphemeral change until we figure out how to ‘harden’ our domestic electronics as well as the big stuff. Many of our youngest, smug that they can handle an Android phone, (a good thing) —do not know how the world works, and has worked, and worse, do not know that what they don’t know can hurt them. They do not check their ‘facts.’ Being innocent of fraud, while trying to look so worldly-wise and cynical, they believe what they’re told, instead of double-checking to see if it’s a line of bull. We have, to paraphrase Ms. Rowling, a lot of technological muggles that don’t know what’s flying past them unseen, and they are young ones as well as old. I always used to tell my students—we are ALWAYS one generation removed from the dark ages, and you are it.
I hear you, but… I think we’re about of an age. What was that age? Kent State. Berkeley. Woodstock. Peace & Love. Communes. Bleary Leary. I once wore my hair in a 16″ pony-tail. I remember “Okie from Muskogee”. Talk about naive kids.