[OESY]

Prescient.

[ClearCase_guy]

Is this another Tom Lehrer thread? Yesterday's was fun.

[billorites]

In a related story, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced a new plan today for Martian redistricting.

[Paul Ross]

A more interesting article on the same subject is located here.

[ikka]

In 1989, the first President George Bush announced plans for a permanent Moon base and sending astronauts to Mars. But the plans died after NASA estimated it would cost more than $400 billion to get to Mars.

To put this in perspective: this is less than what one year of the new "compassionate" Medicare bill would cost.

[Williams]

I'm 100% pro space exploration. The Moon is a puddle jump away. shuttle to and from sounds good. But I find it hard to believe that in 20 years or less we're going to be able to manufacture usable rocket fuel on Mars via robots. But then, I'm no rocket scientist.

[Michael81Dus]

I´m wondering why there are so many space programs. Why do NASA, ESA, the Chinese, the Russians have programs for their own? Granted, I wouldn´t want to rely on China, but what about a further cooperation? Or is it all about politics and not the progress in science?

[Dead Dog]

Actually, we are moving away from Von Braun's blue print. Von Braun had the shuttle and the Station. Sounds like we are ditching those dead ends...not that their failure had anything to do with Von Braun, they would have worked had they been funded and given a clear mission.

[Aquinasfan]

Should we have a reason for spending a lot of money for a trip to Mars besides the fact that Werner von Braun thought it was a good idea?

[evets]

Jack 'rocket-man' Parsons bump! +Braun +Parsons +Crowley

[SunkenCiv]

I'm 100 per cent behind sending probes to Mars, and 100 per cent opposed to human missions to Mars in the foreseeable future. It's a matter of cost and practicality.

Second Mars Rover sends pictures to Earth
by Andrew Bridges
Jan. 25, 2004

"I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," Steven Squyres, the mission's main scientist, said early Sunday. "I still don't know what we're looking at." ...Mission members hooted and hollered as the images splashed on a screen in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was there with his wife, Maria Shriver, to watch the drama unfold, and walked through mission control shaking hands with the scientists... Together, the twin 384-pound rovers make up a $820 million mission to seek out geologic evidence that Mars was a wetter world possibly capable of sustaining life.

Just to save time, I'll say that Mars has never been a wetter world possibly capable of sustaining life. It does however have microbial life in the soil, as was shown by the Viking lander 25 years ago (and then denied by NASA ever since).

Why is Mars red?
by Hazel Muir

"There is something of a paradox about Mars," agrees Joshua Bandfield of Arizona State University in Tempe. His team recently showed that the planet has no large deposits of carbonates, which should have formed if giant pools of water had persisted on the surface. Bandfield suggests that liquid water must have occasionally burst out of the ground, carving channels and gullies, but that it quickly froze again in the frigid Martian climate.

Mars has always been about the size it is now. To find on Earth the kind of atmospheric pressure found on Mars, one has to be at 40 MILES altitude. On Mars water ice sublimes to water vapor, without being liquid, and due to Mars' size and density, those conditions have always prevailed.

The only exception would be due to an impact, which could produce enough water vapor to create a temporary atmosphere dense enough for liquid water to flow. That is exactly the kind of thing seen on Mars -- erosion leading from nowhere to nowhere.

A while back the local paper here had an article about Christopher McCay's "second genesis" theory about Mars. Luckily, it closed with this:

A consensus is now growing among planetary specialists, however, that except for brief early periods more than 4 billion years ago when gigantic meteors might have heated the Martian surface and melted subsurface waters, the Red Planet has always been a cold and icy object, according to Philip Christensen of Arizona State University.

[SunkenCiv]

Ping!