Clark Lindsey, who’s covering space stuff much better than I could hope to right now, given my schedule, has some thoughts about the effect of seeing Mars on the public:
The article speculates that this sort of remote sensing of Mars via the internet will satisfy the public’s interest in the planet. I think it will have quite the opposite effect. The landers’ imagery transforms Mars from an abstraction into a real place and will entice and inspire many either to want to go there themselves or at least to want to see living, breathing, thinking representatives of the human race go there and report back their impressions and experiences in person.
No daily permalinks yet, so scroll down to January 27th. There are other good links and info there as well. And listen to Clark on The Space Show tonight. There will be a live stream available here.
Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee died horribly, from asphyxiation and incineration, in a test of the Apollo capsule. It caused a massive overhaul of the Apollo program, but less than two years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.
Some of you may have noticed that my site was having problems for the past few days. They’re fixed for now, but all comments and trackbacks since last Wednesday or so are lost. They’re not irretrievably gone, but they’re no longer in the data base. This evening, I’ll point to old versions of the posts, with comments, so if anyone wants to reenter them into the data base, they can. I don’t have the time to do so.
Clark Lindsey has some useful thoughts on all of the silly commentary about the cost of the president’s new space initiative. (If you’re reading this in the future, scroll down to the January 23rd entry)