(Which makes you wonder – if someone shot a ballistic object with a chunk of plutonium at us, we might get somewhat upset. Hope the Martians are forgiving – and that there is no such thing as a Martian cat).

Stuff the Olympics – the real Human achievements are happening on Mars today.  Awesome stuff.

Thankfully there are people and companies like SpaceX who are working to make it less true, one small step at a time. I’m optimistic too, both about Curiosity and about the future of space exploration in general.

Ooookay then!

Well, go NASA! USA! USA! USA! …or something.

Obama has been *extremely* friendly to industry and he’s about to be outspent 2:1 in the upcoming election. 

If you want less war and more science, get 150,000 people to protest in every major city in the US, for 4 months straight. Have them demand a constitutional amendment that eliminates private campaign spending. Done and done. 

Now get organizing!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24039281

Question at the 48 min mark.

Edit: I misunderstood your comment before I replied but there is no delete button so I’ll leave it. I see what you are saying, focus on NASA only and on landers only and numbers improve.

Can’t wait for the landing!

How curious. There weren’t a lot of wars the US was involved in in the 90s, but NASA’s budget didn’t increase by leaps and bounds. In 2000 even with a budget surplus nearly 10 times the size of NASA’s budget and no active wars, nobody decided to give NASA any more money.

Prototype missions are done to test new technology. Failing to launch one when it is needed is a failure of your test program. I am criticizing your statement because it is part of the ‘Go’ mentality that NASA needs to rid itself of. Testing is part of the cost of a spacecraft. Rolling the dice should never be a part of spacecraft design.

I really hope that you are not an engineer. If this mission fails due to issues with the skycrane, the root cause investigation is going to state that the mission failed due to “an inadequate testing program and overconfidence in design.”

From http://www.weather.com/news/nasa-mars-rover-20120731 : “If it succeeds, a video camera aboard the rover will have captured the most dramatic minutes for the first filming of a landing on another planet.”

So, it claims shooting, and makes no mention of what happens to the footage beyond that.

 I can see why they’d want to shoot video for later viewing.

I have to say that this sounds really complicated, but I’m sure that they ran multiple simulations of the  actions.  What I’m curious about (ha!) is what kind of redundancies they have build in. So say for example the parachute doesn’t slow them down enough, or during the sky crane maneuver they are coming in too fast. The ability to decide to do things differently based on suboptimal conditions. What is the decision tree for the CPU for the landing. Can it decide. “We are coming in too fast start the retro rockets sooner or longer something.  That is kind of a rules based decision tree that will need to look at and consider what to do instead.

And if it doesn’t make it we will have more people saying, “Someone doesn’t want us to to Mars!

Really hoping this works.

Then you can change the date to November 27th, 2011, and then, watch it do an Earth flyby on November 26th around noon (It doesn’t quite Benjamin Button back into a rocket and launch from Earth, but still…pretty neat).