Industry Hopes Soar With Space Plan (Energy and Aerospace Firms Have Long Lobbied NASA)

Washington Post ^ | Jan 16,2004 | Mike Allen and Greg Schneider

[VxH]

President Bush emphasized American ingenuity, international cooperation and human destiny when he announced his new space policy this week, but the plan also reflected long-held ambitions of the U.S. aerospace and energy industries.

[snip]

An industry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the oil and gas industry, including Halliburton, would benefit considerably from technology that was developed for drilling on Mars, including the tools, the miniaturization, the drilling mechanism, the robotic systems and the control systems.

"How to go up there and drill remotely, seal it off, make sure the well stays stable, analyze it, produce from it -- that has a lot of application right here," the official said. "If you go up and drill down several thousand feet, you've got to have the same types of safety equipment there that you're going to have here, or you'll blow your spacecraft off wherever it landed, if anything comes back at you out of the ground, like it does here."

[VxH]

Wow! What a huge assumption to say that there is anything on Mars that would make a drilling a ~well~ productive.

Are the authors implying that Halliburton is conspiring to get free drilling tech R&D via the proposed space program?

Or maybe this is their way of saying "The evile Bush and Cheney want to drill for Oil on Mars"? Perhaps Green Fleece has discovered secret documentation proving that, several million years ago, Halliburton caused an ice age on Mars which killed all of the Martian dinosaurs so that they would be turned into oil?

Maybe the "sticky mud" is Oil... or, more likely, maybe it's just typical left-spin bovine fecal material.

[CasearianDaoist]

You cannot make this stuff up. LOL

[ClearCase_guy]

An industry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the oil and gas industry, including Halliburton...

They probably agonized over which company to name as an example. "Texaco? Exxon? Global Marine? Ahhhhh why not Halliburton? Hmmm?"

[ElkGroveDan]

What a huge assumption to say that there is anything on Mars that would make a drilling a ~well~ productive.

Geologic drilling isn't just for wells. Drilling is also done to locate mineralogical deposits and ores.

[VxH]

"drill remotely, seal it off, make sure the well stays stable, analyze it, produce from it"

I'm not an expert on drilling, but to my layman's eye, "produce from it"  seems to imply oil and gas.

[ElkGroveDan]

Yeah I'll give you that. It is a stupid thing to say.

[VxH]

>>Yeah I'll give you that. It is a stupid thing to say.

Well, it is an election year.

I suppose we should prepare for an unusually large wave of underhanded cheap-shot "journalism".

It's totally amazing that they managed to find a way to spin Mars exploration into "It's all about oil".

Anything good that GW tries to do is met with: "Yea but.. it's all about the oil".

Note to Leftists: Teach Poly Parrot some new clever phrases. "It's all about the Oil" is old and uninteresting.