10 thoughts on “Opportunity’s Future”

  1. Yeah well, for someone purportedly so smart and highly educated, NdGT makes a habit of saying things that make it seem he knows little outside his field of expertise (to be generous). Honestly, I haven’t followed him closely enough to know whether he can speak coherently WITHIN his field of expertise!

    1. Tyson says wrong stuff in the field of astrophysics as well. A few examples:

      Tyson has written gravity falls off exponentially with distance from gravitating body. But gravity falls with inverse square of distance.

      Tyson wrote that Arthur C. Clarke was the first to calculate the altitude of geosynchronous orbit. Clarke deserves credit for suggesting GEO comm sats in 1945. But Herman Potočnik calculated the altitude of GEO as early as 1929.

      In his trailer for The Martian, Tyson had Hermes departing from LEO. Hermes was an ion propelled craft whose max acceleration was 2 mm/s^2. It would have take nearly two months to spiral out of earth’s gravity well from LEO. Which wrecks Weir’s 124 day trajectory from Earth to Mars.

  2. I caused a bit of a shit storm over at space news when I posted a copy of your safe is not an option book cover. I thought the opinion piece was a bit over board for bringing into the article “how much is an astronaut’s life worth” when talking about the spacex rocket accident…. I think it was still a little early to start in about astronauts riding on a rocket that is, still just hauling cargo, will continue to be just haulling cargo for a couple years and 25- 30 more flights….

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