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Space

Mars Odyssey begins 84

Posted by michael from the wild-red-yonder dept.
Soft writes: "NASA's latest Mars probe has had a good launch on the first try. Stories at SpaceflightNow, CNN, and the BBC. The Delta rocket's onboard camera gave impressive pictures of the ascent..." Read the CNN story for an awesome picture from the nose of the rocket looking back. I want a print of that.
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Mars Odyssey begins More

Mars Odyssey begins

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  • bigger pics (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/mission/launch.ht ml

    no link - copy and paste it, you lazy fuck
  • I remember 4 years ago they used to put downloadable movies showing the complete launch on the web. One was a 320x240 which cut between the onboard camera and the ground. Nowadays internet hosting budgets and staffs have been cut so far it's like we've stepped back 30 years.
  • Put me and Heidi Klum in there - I'll keep at least me entertained for a year :)

    Is there a problem with putting the capsule on a shuttle and just sending a shuttle to Mars? It'll give more room and storage for a landing device. I suppose it'd take more fuel for the needed thrust to head out and leave Mars.

  • We need a proper offworld colony. Not this endless succession of rock-counting toys.
    --
  • Wow! Looks like some bad-tempered little geek virgin got out of bed the wrong side this morning! Don't you like the girls, AC? For Christ's sake, go out and get laid: she won't bite you! (Well, not unless you ask...)
  • There is a project to do just that: put one or more telecommuncations satellites in orbit around Mars, to provide 24-hour comms access from any part of the Martian surface. The Mars Telecom Network, it's called: more details here. [nasa.gov]
  • People are working on it: see www.marssociety.org [marssociety.org]. According to Robert Zubrin in "Mars Direct", we could go this decade if we really wanted to.
  • It was a low-res video camera!
  • Have you consider the possibility that the signal loss was due to the increasing distance between the transmitter and receiver? These things tend to happen when the transmitter is flying away from you at Mach 25.
  • I like that video camera idea, it'd be neat like a webcam or something. The first webcam in space?
    Well, the other idea could work. Airplane black boxes probably wouldn't work though. Airplanes are objects that travel in the atmosphere, they don't have to go through the atmosphere. Black Boxes also don't have radio transmitters that can reach earth or a sattalite in orbit. That'd be a kicker, because there wouldn't be many things that could retrieve it, none that could do it cheaply or efficeintly.

    ---
  • For all of you out there who don't know how to do conversions, here's a simple SI/metric conversion table:

    distance: 1 meter = 1 meter
    mass: 1 kilogram = 1 kilogram
    volume: 1 liter = 1 liter

    Let's hope NASA doesn't need it!
  • If cancelling the Mars mission could prevent even one idiot from trying to spend my money on something he thinks in a problem, then I'm all for it.
  • If mfarah stops posting and dissappears for no reason I am going to start to be scared.

  • actually, the reason the Mars Observer was not heard from is that it landed on martian territory without permission. For that reason, the Mars government is holding the probe and examining all the high-tech observation equipment on board. Their government wants to look tough to their citizens, so they have taken a hard line and not allowed any communication to take place between Earth and the probe.

    This probe is not going to land on the planet, but will stay in interplanetary territory. Join me in hoping this mission goes better, or our relations with Mars could seriously deteriorate.

    --

  • NASA launched a Space Odyssey. The name is a nice tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, whether intentional or not.

  • Re:Video Incredible (Score:3)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Saturday April 07, 2001 @01:33PM (#308261) Homepage Journal
    Totally agree. It would be cool if they added movie cameras to the space probes, that way once a week we could see where it is going and what it is leaving behind. At least this way we should be able to see when something goes wrong.

    This gives me another idea: mini black boxes, with beacons, for the landing craft that could survive even the total disingration of the probe itself. At least thay way we could work out where the probe crashed - this would be possible since there is still the global suveyor orbiting Mars.

  • Wow, the quality of that video is incredible. What a thrill to actually see some stuff happening like the spinup in the thrid clip.

    Anyone with pointers to camera system specs/downlink specs? Who made this, why did they add the cameras? What OS was it all running?

    In light of the recent reports that the folks on Alpha have spent tons of time trying to get Microsoft Outlook to work right, would be neat to find out what powered something that looked as good as this.

  • >why not spend these billions and billions to perhaps stop kids from smoking, drinking, or trying marijuana?

    they already spend billions on those and it doesn't work... may as well throw the money into space than down the toilet.

  • Seems we have no shortage of Katz apprentices...

    You seem to forget, however, that part of the success of the Apollo program was due to abandoning old methodologies.

    I am talking about the "all-up" Saturn V testing program, which was a departure from previous multistage rockets which were all tested stage-by-stage. The first Saturn V flew with all 3 stages firing for the first time. This concept scared the piss out of lots of people, and it was a big gamble.

    But it worked, and you know what, there would have been no way we'd have gotten to the Moon by 1969 (or ever, judging by the tenacity of the public's acceptance of Apollo) without that integrated testing.

    And did you forget that Pathfinder worked, although it has a completely insane landing strategy?

    Things break. The Voyager 2 spacecraft was about one flaky capacitor away from total loss of communication with the Earth, but JPL wrangled with it until it worked. Give the guys some credit.
  • Back to the future, indeed. I remember a presentation about how NASA was going to be "better, cheaper". I guess the two Mars crashes have been a tough reality check...
  • Want to know why there are now black boxes/web cams? These guys spend MEGA bucks trimming weight, so that they can even launch the darned thing. If they have a kilo or two of "spare" weight "budget", they'll tack on another experiment! One of the hard parts in satelite design is figuring out what experiments go, and which get cut. Picture telling some researcher somewhere that has been working for 20 years on a theory, "Sorry, we don't have the 2 lbs for your instrament"
  • One problem is the bandwidth required for full motion video. Mars Global Surveyor sends at 21 to 85 kbps, depending on the relative distance between Mars & Earth. If you make it 160x320 at 10fps, then you've just eaten up about 1/4 of your bandwidth. Another problem is the extra mass, which is always a consideration in constructing something to be launched. If you're interesting in getting some real time data, then NASA has a page [nasa.gov] where you can check the telemetry. It's just text, but it's all there, and live.

  • wow (Score:1)

    by Illserve ( 56215 )
    You've obviously got some strong feelings about the manner. I don't doubt that NASA is taking an aggressive stance in affirmative action, I saw evidence of that when I spent a summer at Langeley. But don't you think you're being a tad apocalyptic when you describe them as nearly dead?

  • When looking back at the recent phase of NASA's better cheaper faster program that has now ended with this much more carefully managed expedition, I can't help but wonder if the cultural ramifications of the "new economy" were far more widespread than just the dot.com hysteria.

    Perhaps NASA also got caught up in the mindset that great things were possible by abandoning the careful ways of the previous space program. At the time this new methodology seemed to make sense to me as well. Perhaps all of the care and planning that had previously made our space program so successful was overly redundant, and we could do better by cutting corners and launching more missions, particularly when no human lives were at stake.

    But now that we are on the downside of the bubble, we're all shaking our heads and asking what we were thinking? Haste apparently still makes waste. What gave us the idea that we could abandon our ways of old and expect things to just work better?

    Note, I'm not criticizing NASA. Variety is the spice of life, and the failure of the quick and dirty approach will be a valuable lesson in the history books. And of course, noone was killed in the process.

    It just strikes me as too much of a coincidence that this new economy fad and NASA's revolution in thought occurred at about the same time. So perhaps the ramifications of our recent economic mania were much deeper than we had thought, extending into our culture in a way that affected the space program as well.

    Just a thought, flame at will.
  • I give NASA all kinds of credit. I have nothing but respect for the things they have done. You've misread me apparently.

    It was just an idea to bounce off you guys, I didn't expect a kind of Spanish...

  • Do you know the annual national budget of NASA? If selling a few pretty pictures and t-shirts doesn't cut it for open source, why would you think it would for NASA?

  • have a look at space.com [space.com] - someone already has the photos, dude

  • If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me.

    Perhaps this is how NASA can focus on profitibiliy instead of relying upon their slowly withering venture capitol. It's high-time that they start paying attention to their bottom line, and not continue to operate at a loss every quarter. I mean, can our future really bear the brunt of losing nasa.gov the way that we've lost boo.com, pets.com, and etoys.com

    NASA - I beg of you, please - for the children... allow us to purchase your pretty space pictures and other memoralbilia so that you may stay in business for another age to appreciate.

  • Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!

    (had to be said...)
  • Let's just hope they got their conversions from SI to metric right.
    -----
  • The last time I went to Mars, I came back with a new guitar, an effects pedal, and a box of saxophone reeds. I thought my wife was gonna kill me.

    Oh, the actual planet Mars... oh, well, I heard its made of red cheese (gouda?).

    (yeah, lame, I know... I just got done turning myself into a lobster while mowing the lawn, so sue me.)

  • yeah, but I'm a bit of a reed snob (though I know many who are by far worse...). I usually get 2 boxes - Vandoren 4's and Vandoren Java 4's. Both for alto. I think the reeds only cost a total of $30. The Standard Strat was a bit of a different story, cost-wise. I suppose I could have gotten the SRV custom, but then have been killed.

  • You'd have plenty of room for fuel, but you'd have two problems:

    DS1 is light, the Space Shuttle is massive. Acceleration would be very slow. You'd eventually get there, but it'd take quite awhile, even accelerating the whole time.

    DS1 needed 2.5 kilowatts to generate as much thrust as the weight of a piece of paper. In order to get something the mass of the Shuttle to get there, you'd need a powerful, light nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors are hard to make light enough - there's a lot of energy per unit mass, but not really enough when you're doing a manned trip using an ion drive.

    A nerva or vasimir(sp?) drive might work better. If you could make a large, light, reflective sheet, you could use it as a solar sail.
  • Here's an idea - fund NASA and government social programs with a combination of lotteries and donations. Yeah, the rich should give to the poor, but the poor should not take from the rich. Let the donators decide who will be funded.
  • SI == metric. I suppose you meant conversion between SI and English units.

    I can understand Joe Sixpack having trouble with metric. But these people working for NASA are presumably educated. They ought to know better.

    So to hell with conversion. Just use metric.
    --
    Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
    Delenda est Windoze

  • If NASA was really looking for life or past life on Mars, they would have better and more pictures of the Cydonia region. The shots taken of the face are often at low resolution and bad angles. The rest of the region needs more photographing. It isn't like the rest of Mars is more interesting.

    This official web page shows the left side of the face with an eye in the socket:

    Official Site [msss.com]

    This unofficial web page shows a study of the latest picture:

    Unofficial site [enterprisemission.com]

    Trying to say that past civilizations in the solar system have to be bunk and need not be studied misses the point of exploration in the first place.

    - James - [IMAGE]

  • The real question is what kind of computer is there on board

    Computers aboard spacecraft are usually rather primitive, radiation hardening is their main virtue.

    I want my money back from the time I saw 2001, back in 1969. None of it happened.

  • ...in the case of Venus a blast furnace whose primary atmospheric component is sulphuric acid...

    an interesting set of specs: being a spaceship, it must be extremely lightweight, yet able to withstand a hundred atmospheres of pressure at 400 degrees Centigrade, passing through sulphuric acid mist to get there. Even more interesting: a couple of spaceships actually managed to land on Venus and send a few pictures from the surface.

  • Is it just me, or does anyone else see these little news clips as CNN's way of pushing MORE advertising into our faces ... about, of all things, CNN? Not only do I get a a bloody ad banner in their javascript pop-up box, I get a five second CNN-related intro at the start of the clip, and the clip itself is followed with with ANOTHER ad!

    Can you say, "Blowing your own horn?" Sheesh! And Americans wonder why nobody likes them.

  • But they are not looking for life currently, they are looking for historical signs. Heard something about if there's free hydrogen in the atmosphere or some compounds in the soil, that would lead to the assumption of water on the planet at one time.

    I think that after it lands, that will be the more newsworthy day.
    DanH
    Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
  • The Shuttle would never make it out of Earth's gravity well.

    --
  • The point is that the shuttle is well designed for the task that it does, but is poorly designed for anything else.
    It would be a waste of weight to design a re-usable veichle for one flight.

    --
  • Looks like the Mars defense force is going to have another target so shoot at.

    I mean, how many times do you have to send a packet or something before you figure out that the problem is at the other end?

    Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" explores this in a neat way.

  • Launch photos (Score:4)

    by proxima ( 165692 ) on Saturday April 07, 2001 @12:26PM (#308289)
    Unfortunately, the photo Michael likes so much is among a bunch that are only available at low resolution here at the Mars Odyssey Website [nasa.gov]. More important scientific photos and artist renderings are frequently available in high-quality tiff format at places like this [nasa.gov]. I don't know if they had a high enough resolution camera to take the sort of pictures needed for reprint.

    If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto [ofoto.com] make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me (thanks for the idea, Michael).

  • Looks like the Mars defense force is going to have another target so shoot at.

    I mean, how many times do you have to send a packet or something before you figure out that the problem is at the other end?

    We do not want to end up like that engineer in the old joke about the engineer at the army firing range, however.

    Very quickly, he was at target partice, and kept missing the target. The DI chewed him out for missing the target. Engineer puts his finger in the barrel of the gun, pulls the trigger, blowing off the finger tip. And so he promptly informs the DI that the problem must be at the other end.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.

    except for potential flybyes, none most likely.

    After all, for both you would need something that could sustain extended times on the inside of a blast furnace.

    and in the case of Venus a blast furnace whose primary atmospheric component is sulphuric acid, or some such thing.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • an interesting set of specs: being a spaceship, it must be extremely lightweight, yet able to withstand a hundred atmospheres of pressure at 400 degrees Centigrade, passing through sulphuric acid mist to get there.

    I am sure there is a joke in here someplace, with the climate of Venus, etc. Probably along the line of "Love is Hell", or some such thing.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • From the Lab that prepared the craft here's the story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/odysseypostl aunch.html [nasa.gov]

  • Yup. The coverage of some of the spacewalks for the space station have been pathetic. They go to all the trouble to deliver tons of live net video streams and NASA-TV, and then what do they do? They point the camera at an inanimate joint for 60 minutes while the astronauts do all sorts of interesting things nearby equipped with helmet cams. Goodbye.., thanks for nothing.

    The video here [nasa.gov] was spectacular, except it's a proprietary RealMedia format which prevents me from saving it to disk. So if I want to watch it again, ever, I have to download it each time. Real smart. I mean, it's Nasa, what reason do they have for not letting me save it to disk? They want to use RealMedia because it's a great compression format, fine. But whey the hell is it streaming only?

    On a related note, just why is it that the fidelity of the astronaut communications sound like total shit? My $10 telephone and $5 computer mic give better sound quality than what they've got. You'd think that clear communications would be some sort of safety priority or something. It's not like it requires a 10Mbit datastream!

  • Yeah, what about hibernation like in science fiction? If we had advanced enough hibernation technology we could send 4 or 5 people easily to mars.

    We'd just need to trust NASA that they could send the people to Mars without problems while they're hibernating (having no one on board who could fix a remote problem)...
  • If I was put in there with Heidi Klum, there would be enough thrust to get that thing to Jupiter and back twice over :D

    Seriously though, what about plasma propulsion using cesium (where the ions are stripped off of a cesium core and give about 1 gram of thrust)? I'm sure once the shuttle was in space they could have a LOT of plasma chargers, rockets, whatever you want to call them.

    The speed would be constantly accelerating the whole time, they wouldn't to worry about running out of fuel. It *could* work, right? Right?!
  • I've always had this little idea... You know from movies and stuff when the little missions and surveying stuff goes to the farside of mars and we lose communication?

    Well, If they send a few satallites to Mars equipped with communication hardware along with surveying stuff, etc- we would be able to communicate with anything there almost. And if there was multiple satallites doing certain tasks they could get the job done much quicker.

    I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it :)
  • I was specifying more along the lines of unmanned craft that would have to do little more than orbit and perform some terrain-mapping in the case of Mercury (what else is there to do on such a desolate little fireball?) and perhaps a minor atmospheric breech on Venus to take some soil samples and take a curious little look around. If Venus is supposedly our "sister planet" then I'm surprised there's not a great deal of interest in it. I think any type of habitable spacecraft making its way to either of these planets will more than likely be decades from now, or a score or so for that matter. I doubt there will be any significant changes in our spacial knowledge on common grounds for some time to come, though.
  • I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.
  • Just wanted to clarify that the cameras were not on the tip of the rocket, they(2 of them) were attached to the second stage. One was looking up, and one was looking down, the idea being that you can see the 3rd stage break off and second light up and also the second break off and possibly the first ignite as long as it stayed in view of the falling camera long enough. Watched the launch on NASA TV this morning on my dish. Oh and on another note, I thought I'd point out that in the ground control room for the oddessy mission there's a little green inflatable man up in the corner you could see on the camera(the control room for the mission, not the launch control room.) --
  • What if they calculated the course in Angstroms instead of Astronomical Units? This "Odyssey" would become the next "Voyager"!
  • Of course I have. I never thought that this might me something "serious", but it was funny to watch (including the reactions of the listeners in the background) :-)
  • Did you notice how they lost video signal at the end of this video?

    http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/odyssey/010407onspi n_qt.html [spaceflightnow.com]

    Bigger, Better, Cheaper eh? ;)
  • You can watch NASA TV over the internet here [space.com]. (The nice videos you saw on the news sites are taken from NASA TV - it's pretty interesting).

  • Another DOOMED voyage... (Score:3)

    by mfarah ( 231411 ) <miguel&farah,cl> on Saturday April 07, 2001 @12:16PM (#308305) Homepage
    What the public doesn't know is the REAL reason that the Mars probes haven't had any success: they were shot down by the Mars Space Army!

    Our probes were spy satellites, sent to peep on the MSA forces and were shot down for that reason. The Pathfinder was spared because it landed on an unpopulated area (the desert of Gniiiijks's's-daaasd) and because that way it wouldn't stir up public suspicion.

    Our government's double agents at the NASA (horribly infiltrated by Marzies) have managed to provide the UN and key human governments with vital information as to the Mars Federation purposes: they intend to

    1. sabotage all our satellites, so we'll be left blind (already destroyed the Iridium project, remember that one?)
    2. invade EARTH within the next five years, USA in particular
    3. claim Earth as part of the Mars Federation
    4. once that is done, SUE the makers of Mars bars, for copyright infringement!

    It's our duty to come up with an open source candy bar that doesn't violate the Mars patents ASAP, or switch to Snickers or Three Musketeers (we can't use Milky Way, that one's taken, too).

    --
    Death to Vermin.

  • Apparently no one at NASA is superstitious, good on them. Odyssey was the name of the Apollo XIII command module, for the NASA-uninitiated. (The LEM was Aquarius). Apollo XIII's motto was "Ex Luna, Scientia"... can anyone tell me if the Mars mission has a latin motto? =P

    -Kasreyn
  • The odysses landed on the wrong planet due to miscalculations.
  • hoooo-boy! I'm outta here. Mars, here I come. Terra-forming doesn't take that long does it? I'd like to move into my new martian home by the end of the year.

  • I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.

    Hard to tell, given the titanic budget overruns on the space station, which are very effective at consuming other missions' credits. Well, there had been MESSENGER [jhuapl.edu], which was supposed to get into orbit around Mercury, but I guess this has been cancelled at the same time as Deep Impact. I am not aware of any project for Venus, maybe all the data from Magellan [nasa.gov] hasn't been digested yet?

    Aside from that, I wouldn't call Mercury "more local" than Mars; it's more difficult to get there. Maybe Venus, but then landing there without melting/crushing/falling apart is even harder...

  • Well, If they send a few satallites to Mars equipped with communication hardware along with surveying stuff, etc- we would be able to communicate with anything there almost. And if there was multiple satallites doing certain tasks they could get the job done much quicker.

    Mars Odyssey has that capability for future lander missions. Mars Climate Orbiter also had, but you know how that ended. Mars Global Surveyor can also provide a limited service, but it won't live there forever. The European Space Agency's Mars Express [esa.int] will also be able to act as a relay.

    I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it :)

    Sure, they all like to dream... But IMHO it's going to be a long time before they get the credits for that.

  • NASA... please, oh please, don't make any dumb mistakes.. if the mars mission fails again, the project will die. Check your units!

    You can bet the units are fine. The real question is what kind of computer is there on board, is it an AI, and has it been given the same orders as HAL?

  • Looks like the Mars defense force is going to have another target so shoot at.

    But have you noticed that, unlike previous launch windows, we are launching only one spacecraft instead of two? An orbiter and no lander. But there is a lander, which was deemed "unsuitable" simply because it was too similar to Mars Polar Lander.

    The only logical explanation is that this one is a decoy, and the lander will be launched as a top-secret payload, and nuke the Martian missile silos.

    Right?

  • I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it :)

    There's an interesting article in this month's Discover Magazine on the psychological stresses that come about when you stick a bunch of people in a tiny capsule for a year. Looks like this is another of the difficulties we're going to have to overcome before anything happens.

  • So, what is going to happen "near Oct 24th 2001"?
    Please tell me now, since NASA is going to cover it up.

    - dave f.
  • Thsi is the what # probe sent to Mars? And with our Wonderful President Bush's budget cuts, if this screws up, those damnmdable Martains will have their whole frickin planet to themselves for ANOTHER decade. This is why i want to be president. Vote Bacon in 2020!!

  • ...it is more exciting than Val Kilmer and Gary Sinise's recent trips to Mars.
  • Equipment fails! Even horribly expensive Equipment fails. Dont assume that a few failures means the thought or design was wrong. "The best laid plans of Mice and Man oft go Awry."
  • Hmmm...remind me to hire you the next time my employees need target practice. Let's say you're right, let's say women are to blame for the recent failures. At least they don't have the blood of astronauts and teachers on their hands.

  • NASA's current exploration strategy is to seek out signs of life elsewhere in our solar system, and to pave the way for potential human landings. Mars wins on both counts, while neither Mercury nor Venus is likely to harbor life, and neither is hospitable enough to permit a human landing (at least in the near future).

    For Venus, there's already a mountain of mapping data from the Magellan probe, which is still providing insights into Venusian surface geology. Mercury remains (surprisingly) largely unknown. There was a single Mariner mission about thirty years ago, but that left roughly half the surface unmapped. I read a proposal for a return to Mercury to complete the job, but it was likely scrapped due to budget cuts. However, AFAIK most data indicates that Mercury is essentially a copy of our own moon, and hence not very interesting.

  • "the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. "

    You say these kinds of things about women, and you wonder why you have the time to write such long posts on a Saturday evening...

    ""Learn from mistakes" and all the other touchy feely swill. "

    Because, as we all know, science is all about getting it right the first time...

    "NASA is nearly dead, and their irrational bias in hiring quotas is most of the problem. "

    Yeah. Only a dead government organization can land a probe on an asteriod. A probe that wasn't designed to land. Marking the first time in history that we (the U. S.) was the first to land on something.

    "NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. "

    I attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The majority of my friends have graduated from there with either a degree in aerospace engineering or engineering physics. Most of them now work in the aerospace industry in one form or another, with several working for NASA directly. Not one of them has had to take an IQ test in the hiring process. Federal security clearances, yes, but not IQ tests. IIRC, the last time that IQ tests were used in government positions was before WWI.

    "This is a fact! "

    And, gosh darn it, if you say it's a fact, then it must be a fact! Empirical evidence and scientific method be damned!

    "NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of wack with societies norms. The mars missions are even more than 2% female."

    Judging from my school's gender ratio of 8:1, there are few women in the aerospace industry. However, the majority of the women that are in the industry seem to be in the engineering fields as opposed to being pilots or airplane mechanics. I'd say the gender ratio in the engineering fields is 3:1 to 4:1 or so. Nowhere near the 49:1 that you are suggesting.

    "EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male."

    Erm... if there's an 8x difference, how do you justify the use of the word "equivalent?" Are we comparing to a 24-y.o. male with a doctorate in aerospace engineering to a 24-y.o. female cashier? Sure, they're both the same age, both work in fields where mathematics is important, but...

    "The average IQ is the same for both genders 100,"

    You mean they try to write the tests so that the average is 100. Well, it would be more correct to say they tried, because this was almost a century ago.

    "NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in!"

    Launch facilities are in Florida. Can you justify building the rockets in any other state? Do you want all us taxpayers to flip the bill to move SRB's from, say, Alaska or Hawaii?

    Engines are tested in Mississippi and Alabama. Do you really think a manufacturer can win a bid if they have to include transportation costs from Michigan? And, if they do, do you really want that engine on your rocket?

    ""The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million. "

    Hmmm... When the number of missions to Mars goes up, the number of failed missions to Mars goes up. Imagine that! I suppose next you're going to point out how the number of air accidents has gone up exponentially since the beginning of the 20th century...

    "the recent theme was about how the shuttle is now COMMANDED by a female and the motto was"

    I watched that particular launch from Titusville. After several aborted launch attempts due to weather, Col. Collins did just fine getting Discovery into orbit, especially considering the unusual weight of the Chandra X-Ray Telescope.

    "were paid tax dollars to periodically talk about how NASA needs even MORE females and black engineers "

    Sending employees out to colleges to recruit future employees. How unusual.

    NASA needs more engineers period. Until recently, the question was "Why study engineering when I can make more money with a computer degree?" Opening the field up to more genders/races/whatevers increases their labor pool.

    "Lori B. Garver = Associate Administrator for NASA's Office of Policy and Plans, Executive Secretary of Advisory Council (She does not have an engineering degree!) "

    You need an engineering degree to work in HR?

    "I think male rage-envy sabotage (yes sabotage) is to blame for the many Mars mission losses. "

    If men are inclined to do something like that, then they shouldn't be in the program to begin with. It was that kind of pride-before-safety attitude that destroyed Challenger.

    Not that you, a white male naturally inclined to higher IQ's, would screw up and counter your own arguments....

  • NASA... please, oh please, don't make any dumb mistakes.. if the mars mission fails again, the project will die. Check your units!
  • While various sorts of deep-space propulsion techniques are exciting, and perhaps not even too far from completion, it's often not realized that their main impact won't (for a considerable time) be on travel times. Your basic Hohmann orbit trip to Mars takes 1.5-2 years, if you pick the best launch times. To cut this down by a factor of two requires some serious thrust, enough so that the limiting factor in providing it will really be our launch capacity from Earth, not our drive technologies. Drives need propellant. To give a ship the mass of the shuttle orbiter (or even an apollo capsule) a significant thrust for a period of weeks requires an awful lot of propellant with even the most far-out drive designs. Drives not needing propellant tanks (ramjets and solar sails) are still in the never-been-tested stage at this point. What an ion drive, or Vasimir, is really good for is massively improving your in-flight maneuvering drives, which can increase your flexibility and decrease your launch weight quite a bit. But speeding you to your destination, no.

    On the up side, Discover magazine is smoking some serious crack. Regardless of the (far from proven) beliefs of modern psychologists, throughout the centuries of the Age of Exploration bad-luck travelers often wound up in much more isolated states for similar periods of time. The history race to the poles, for instance, is replete with groups of a dozen men, iced in near the North Pole for an entire winter. Now, these guys weren't trained and selected astronauts; as often as not, many of them were basically picked up off the docks by a captain looking for foolhardy volunteers. They were far more cut off than any astronaut in the internet era; they didn't have videophone calls, or e-mail, or electronic libraries, or psychologists at mission control. They were starving, getting scurvy, losing limbs. And often, they had no certainty of rescue.

    Nevertheless, for them, mutiny and murder were still uncommon. I don't particularly understand what about their cultural backgrounds or individual psychologies allowed them to do this. I am not at all certain that I would be able to do the same. But history makes it very clear that it is not only possible, but not even very hard.

  • It would be cool if they added movie cameras to the space probes, that way once a week we could see where it is going and what it is leaving behind. At least this way we should be able to see when something goes wrong.

    The problem with this is not so much the weight of the cameras, which is pretty minimal, but the power systems and data bandwidth. Few pieces of space hardware have either to spare for anything not crucial, although NASA recieved a lot of criticism for cost cuts that led to the lack of telemetry from Mars Polar Lander during its last moments. At any rate, while a big launch vehicle can easily transmit the video from a camera back down a few miles, doing the same from a little probe a million miles away is just too hard, unless it's contributing to the science. For now, we pretty much settle for sensor data to find what went wrong.

  • When looking back at the recent phase of NASA's better cheaper faster program that has now ended with this much more carefully managed expedition, I can't help but wonder if the cultural ramifications of the "new economy" were far more widespread than just the dot.com hysteria.

    First off, your timing is off. FBC really predates the 'new economy'; it came out of the loss of Mars Observer in, what, something like 1990. The notion was really pretty simple; it was that missions were getting too large. Given the NASA budget and the rate of change of technology, not to mention the working lifespans of scientists and engineers, a $1B mission that took five years or more to prepare was not necessarily preferable to three $300M missions spaced two years apart. It was an eggs in one basket thing.

    The part of more recent programs that was 'quick and dirty' was not really an element of the FBC idea; it was just the result of constant budget pressure on the unmanned probes. Most of that pressure can be blamed on major cost overruns on other programs, like ISS. (Or, if you prefer, on Congress' failure to increase the NASA budget.) You can certainly argue that FBC helped create an environment in which certain kinds of corner-cutting were deemed acceptable, but I think that's a pretty peripheral effect.

    Also, what's forgotten is that NASA's failure rate for unmanned missions has actually been pretty constant since the earliest days. Not to excuse some really stupid mistakes, but the notion that we're getting sloppier is really just a sort of nostalgia thing.

  • ...that we send men to Mars before we do anything else. Just to get it the hell over with.

    That way, we'll be able to take our time in getting our act together to do decent things with Mars.

    Remember:
    "Earth First! We'll Strip Mine the Other Planets Later!"

  • Before we rush into this business of serious space travel, maybe we should ask ourselves: is this exploration, or exploitation?

    It seems like where ever Man goes, he makes a mess of his new environment. Perhaps it's just our great human arrogance, which we all posess, that we think that we can claim God's creations as our own. In this case, it appears that NASA is desperate to claim some sort of success after its string of startling failures over the last decade. Always good to show some kind of "scientific advancement" or benefit when Congress comes around to budget time. Meanwhile our nation's children are sorely lacking in education... why not spend these billions and billions to perhaps stop kids from smoking, drinking, or trying marijuana?

    If even one teen pregnancy could be prevented by diverting such ridiculous sums of money, I think we would all be better off for it.
  • All investigations lead to mars and the space shuttle probe. I figure that it won't be another 20 or so years until the mission is complete and all gerbils have safely landed on the crust of mars. Only when the vessle has landed will the age old question be answered... "I mars really mad up of cheese." Let's just hope for the gerbils that the answer is a resounding "YES".
    -Shamaus My website [hiredtokill.com]
  • Mars Space Shuttle?

    I just finished watching the space shuttle launch to mars. I had no idea that man was already going to mars. And here I have been playing video games all this time! Well congratulations human race! Way to go! I wonder when man will arrive there? How will the gerbils get back? What does this all mean anyways?

    As for the gerbils, I don't care wether or not they survive.

    Peace To All.

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