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Well, the little rover that could has gone and done it. Having survived an epic voyage and a convoluted, dangerous descent, NASA’s Curiosity Rover has successfully landed on the surface of Mars. Nice job, little guy. And nice job all the men and women who designed and built the little guy.
You can follow live coverage of this event over at Gizmodo, where Jesus is live-blogging from inside NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
There are some problems where the solution is impossible to see from a limited perspective, and it’s only when you achieve some distance and see things from another angle that they seem simple. Space exploration broadens the perspective for our entire species.
Additionally if the ‘homeless problem’ (or any other terrestrial problem) was such an easy thing to solve that we could do so by simply throwing NASA’s minuscule budget at it, then we would have already solved those problems.
Mmm. We already give the homeless money, they choose to spend it on alcohol. Everyone in Australia can live in a home if they want to, there’s the doll and housing commission. Homeless people are choosing that lifestyle because of mental illness. Throwing money at it isn’t going to fix the problem, because we already ARE throwing money at it.
As much as I agree that saying NASAs money should go to the homeless is silly, saying everyone in Aus can live in a home if they want is silly also
The US budget spent to for this mission was close to $3 billion dollars total, and this mission has taken many years to culminate.
The US spends that amount ($3.037 billion ) every year on the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), a program that provides housing in poor neighborhoods. It was recently dropped by 20% from $3.7 billion. (And thats just one of the programs in the US that helps with the homeless problem.
NASA’s annual budget is $17 billion, this accounts for 0.48% of the Federal Budget.
As #35 stated, i’d be more concerned with the US’s military spending as opposed to NASA’s spending.
NASA also developed new technologies to help the rover get to and land on Mars. Like with previous space missions, that technology could become useful in our day to day lives in the near future.
2 billion would do very little in the long run for a homeless problem. There are, however, many tax-funded programs spending much, much more, that could be diverted to better pursuits. ‘Defence’ springs to mind. It’s 19% of the US budget. NASA gets less than half a percent.
Maybe more should go to education, hmm?
You sir are one reason why the human race will not survive the next 500 years. Now if NASA had AL Queada’s budget, then we’d be getting somewhere…..
I watched this live feed and for a room full of dudes and gals at consoles it was pretty exciting!
I find it somewhat funny that it’s travelled all that way for 8 months and the first image it sends back is a picture of its own wheel. Does nobody else find that amusing? 🙂
Anyway, I want to see aliens, so they’d better hurry up and find them.
That was the first thing I thought too, and while you know completely how big a success this was, there is one part of your mind going “hurr, just take the picture on earth next time”
I found it amusing that the pictures downloaded at dialup speeds and the first image was 64×64 pixels and then the HD version was 256×256 pixels. The first thing they should do when colonising Mars is set up an IPBN (Inter-planetary Broadband Network).
NB: I do understand why they’re so small and slow to transmit.
Although I’m sure the couple of negative comments is just trolls seeking attention – without the space race and space exploration, most mainstream technology wouldn’t exist today. While some ignorant twats may not give a shit about our solar system, the origins of the universe and the fundamental question of whether there is life somewhere out there – at the very least, this science creates jobs and inspires people to do something with their lives.
Carl Sagan and Cosmos should be a part of every childs school curriculum.
Absolutely agree on Cosmos.
There’s an updated version of it in the works, currently scheduled for 2014, with Neil deGrasse Tyson to take over from Sagan.
So long as they don’t butcher it with misleading, bad visual effects like most modern space programs, I’m all for it!
I suspect deGrasse Tyson wouldn’t put his name on something that used really misleading. effects.
It was stated in the live stream that it cost american’s $7 each to get that rover onto mars. In the US, they spend more on pizza every year then is the total of NASA’s budget.
http://www.universetoday.com/31470/8-ridiculous-things-bigger-than-nasas-budget/
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