If you have any anti-science types in your circle and they start yattering about sending ‘all that money to Mars’ remind them of the fact a crushed car bale—is around $250 a ton if it were pure steel. With plastics, not so much. That’s ALL we ever send off the Earth. The money stays on earth, buying hamburgers and paying housepayments for American workers, while the new processes and materials we produce along the way create new jobs and save lives. NASA returns a dollar for every dime we spend. So it costs us NOTHING to send stuff into space. It actually pays us. Being at it constantly with the research and the testing—is good for our economy. It’s creating something out of pure thought—a lot like writing books, until you get to the printing part. And that’s the most economical creative process there is.
Curiosity rover lands 10:31 Pacific time.
by CJ | Aug 5, 2012 | Journal | 33 comments
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A special on Curiosity is scheduled for Monday evening 10pm as well on Science Channel.
I agree with continuing to support space science and the economic benefits staying “on earth” and mostly in our country. It is a shame anytime a government employee loses a job for other than poor work or malfeasance. Civil servants make citizen interaction with government easier and less time-consuming. Keeping them employed benefits the public as a whole and prevents them from going on unemployment (thus hurting the employed taxpayers)or taking jobs in the private sector from others who might otherwise qualify for the positions. I think our unemployment percentage is going to increase as more civil servants lose jobs if sequestration goes through as planned.Our economy is in trouble and kicking people out of jobs does nobody any good. I hate to say it, but I’d rather pay more in taxes than seecivil servants lose jobs (and because of the rules, the people who lose their jobs will be the younger more tech-savvy and creative government employees rather than the ones who are starting to go on “in-house-retirement.”
Not to mention—when you break up a science team, you lose some to industry, and some of the very best may find employment in other countries. You can’t reassemble them—and you lose out. The very WORST economy is to break up a research team.
They turned the radiation monitor on quite a while back, so they already have that information. Turns out the total for the trip is about half the lifetime exposure limit, even though the shielding cuts it down by a lot.
Thanks for the heads up. I shall be tuned in. Hope the landing is a WIN.
Before you think me entirely loopy, let me explain that I was given the gift of seeing into the racial/collective unconscious about 15 years ago during a shaman journey. So, what I see there is that it doesn’t help that the greedy 1% don’t want more people, nor more technology—if they succeed in their enslavement agenda aka the New World Order plan, they’ll be killing off a whole lot of us. I think they’d be satisfied with less than a million. It’s hard to make slaves out of 7 billion, eh? That was part of what the ovens and such in the holocaust camps was about—studying how to kill and get rid of a lot of people quickly, so they aren’t laying around stinking up the place.
From their perspective, with slaves, your every need is met. Who needs more advanced technology? If you want to see just how things will be, should they succeed, you need only look to the middle (dark) ages. That is the best example of how they want things. ALL the rest of us still surviving will serve as slaves and peasants, while they, the 1%, viciously hungry for power, completely lord over us in their palaces filled with opulence and wealth beyond measure.
The only reason they’ve pushed us to pursue high technology is they’re using us to make weapons to try to protect themselves when the real owners of this world return to kick them off (the biggest part of the 2012 thing that you’ll never hear of, other than the twisted version this group put into Revelations). Unless you are allied with the 1% though, you’ll be safe, if you can stay out of the way. The original owners know we are from this world—they’ll only be going after those who’s spirit ancestors are from a specific alien group.
Sounds like a good story, I know! I hate to present it as fiction though, because it might make it harder for humans to believe once it starts happening.
In case anyone else is confused that is 10:31pm 🙂
Had me confused for a while because everyone is saying half six in the morning for us. Quite handy for me – I’m usually getting ready to go to work about then.
What an exciting time we live in! And your answer to those who object to “spending money on space when we have all these problems here we should solve first” is excellent.
(By the way, does anyone seriously expect to solve all our problems here? It would take at least eternity to accomplish this!)
I’m from Houston. So when the manned space program was canned, a lot of local, well-educated technically-minded types of all disciplines, from individuals to whole companies, then had to find work elsewhere. Because NASA isn’t directly in Houston, but because it draws from all over the area, this meant that people across the entire *county* (more than one county, really) were affected. (Read: They lost their jobs and had to find new ones.)
To give an idea of how connected things are, even when we don’t realize them, consider:
Some years ago, when I went back for my associate’s degree, well after the Challenger disaster but before the Columbia, I sat between classes reading a local newspaper. In it, there was an article remembering the shuttle crew and the contributions of the space program. I don’t ordinarily mutter out loud, but I was alone and particularly moved. So I grumbled something about how we all do remember the crew and the space program. About that time, two or three people walked by, I kept reading, and they walked past.
Later, one of the instructors told me that it was one of the family members who had walked by and heard me, with a friend of my teacher, and this had touched them, because the family had had rough times. I don’t know who it was or the relation. That’s not important. What matters is, that those seven lives all had families and friends, and colleagues, and ordinary people like me, whose lives were improved, because those men and women astronauts, and the host of people who did amazing work, had such daring curiosity, such brashness, as to dream of the stars and actually reach out to grab them. Those people are still there, still eager to see what’s out there.
—–
As contrast to that optimism, something more cautionary and pessimistic:
Aside from that, when I hear the argument that manned space exploration, or any space exploration at all, is a waste, a fantasy, I can’t help but think of the Moties in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s “Mote in God’s Eye / Lucifer’s Hammer” series. The Moties go through cycle after cycle of civilizations rising and falling, but they have reached the point with their latest rise, that they have nearly exhausted all their planet’s natural resources, petrochemicals and fossil fuels in particular, and if their civilization falls again before it makes it into the stars, then…it will never rise again, their species will fall permanently and the species will fail.
Our own species is increasing population at an unsustainable rate. Our natural resources are being used up. Food, energy sources, metals and materials to build with, water, other lifeforms. We’re in some degree of danger (no one agrees exactly how severe or how fast) of serious global warming. Our governments and corporations seem bent on ignoring the dangers, and some groups are actively bent on reducing public freedoms and incomes to the point of servitude and dependency and lack of choices, political or religious or economic choices.
If we *don’t* find a way off the planet, into sustainable ways of living, into space colonies, stations, and ships, and eventually out into other star systems, then what will happen? Will we recede into in-fighting, “us” against “them,” each group against each other group, until no one’s left, not even the apes, just the roaches? Where then would be our vaunted ideologies and morals, our hopes and dreams of improving humanity, or any of it?
No, I don’t think it’s that dire. I sure hope not. There are people who try their best, on all sides of the equation. Those ways of living that don’t work out, that are too aggressive, too wasteful, too careless of human needs or the realities of living with the world and not apart from it, those unworkable ways will lose out in the drive to survive. They have to. Only what’s workable can actually survive.
I think we have a good chance to reach the stars and to veer away from the mass craziness that seems to grip people. But we have to take that chance, or we could lose out. Imagine if some other group (international, it takes a lot of cooperation and resources) manages to make it out into space, but others are so bent on quarreling or preying on their own, that they “miss the bus.”
—–
I don’t know; overwrought rhetoric aside, I just really want to see us reach the other planets in my lifetime. It was July 20th, 1969 when we landed on the moon. I was three years old, sitting in footie pajamas with a blanket, watching the TV as humankind made history. Now I’m 46, and we still haven’t landed people on Mars, or anything more permanent around the Earth or the Moon except the ISS space station, a rickety thing compared to the torus from the movie 2001, and we’re 11 years past that.
But — But we’re landing another exploratory spacecraft on Mars.
“Let’s see what’s out there.”
Par la rêve des étoiles. ~ By the dream of the stars.
Watching live on NASA TV…
10:34 and images are coming through…”it’s a wheel”…
“Keep watching the screen…there’s more stuff!”
“We have landed, and we have our first image.”
“Shadow of the late afternoon sun…”
“The problem is there’s dust…in the air…because we’ve just blown dust in the air, with our descent engines.”
“There is the wheel of the rover, safely on the surface of Mars.”
—They should allow these guys in mission control some Champagne—us.
“That’s the shadow of the Curiosity Rover on the the surface of Mars.”
Going into shadow…”THat’s about all the data we’re going to get, but things look great!”
Curiousity is safely down!!!!
Wonderful atmosphere in the control room!
🙂
Don’t know what you picked up earlier, but apparently the radiation exposure during the flight was less than they thought it would be, but still half a lifetime’s exposure for a human. They’ll be using that data to figure what it’s going to take to shield human travelers in a similar transit.
And—CNN continues oblivious, continuing its feature on mobsters. NBC has the Olympics. And the other channels have re-runs.
An event occurs somewhere on a par with Columbus discovers America…
And they’re asleep at the switch and don’t even cover the news conference.
Screw ’em all.
What a wonderful event! Can I miss the news conference now? It’s time for Eastern Time Zone kids to be in bed, so off I go. Sure glad I stayed up for this, though. Also glad I can sleep in on this holiday today.
I’m amazed. The BBC have finally allowed something other than the Olympics to be the headline on their web site. Going by their current editorial policy that appears to be something almost as impressive as Curiosity.
Not quite though.
Well done to the guys and gals at NASA.
the Guardian on line has a live blog, which is what it usually does for breaking news of significance …
reading it feels like science fiction – though how can we ever catch up with the Union -alliance world ????
And CNN still hasn’t caught up. Our local news has a better article.