Rubbish. The engineering was splendid. Which is why everyone was cheering.. Whether the $2.5 billion expense is justified by the scneice returned remains to be seen.But a two year mission, on paper, means the science community has to justify the expense by delivering $1billion/yr worth of science. Good luck with that ROI brief at the next few deficit-driven budget hearings.

“Our pride is in our technological expertise and sophistication that got us there this time.”

In other words, you’re pitching the NASA baloney that’ it doesn’t matter what is cost as long as the mission was a success.” That doesn’t fly anymore in the era of massive deficits.

By the way, it’s instructive. We’re all overwhelmed not by the distance we’ve gone, or by a rock we’ve arrived at that we’ve never been to before. We’ve gone farther, and landed on this rock before. Our pride is in our technological expertise and sophistication that got us there this time. It was hard. It’s about having the intelligence to make the intelligence that this rover had with it. It’s about putting our smarts in a place where it’s really, really hard for us to go. We’ve truly dared great things, and came out on top.

“Err no. Life if present on Mars would have simply evolved differently.”

Maybe, maybe not. The ‘zone of life’ given the parameters for this solar system may have included the red-rocked world for a time, but it was just far enough away to peter out as essentials boiled off. Or who knows, it may be thriving in the dark corners of the rusty muck by the ooles. Or we may have inadvertently already contaminated the place w/our own bugs by accident.

The stars have aligned. A rare moment of agreement. All the same, let’s hope this thing works tonight, if only to keep the space science kids busy with a new toy and the $2.5 billion wasn’t a total loss.

Even if Curiosity operates for years, the costs have risen beyond an acceptable level for today’s economics. And let your imagination percolate… consider the ‘possibility’ of contamination– by this or some element of the earlier probes both landers and crashers- be it a microbe or two nestled in a parachute fold or a virus sneezed on to an internal component long ago. Who knows if, decades after the Viking landers, some bug that escaped the shake and bake process of sterilization, adapted, morphed and survived to thrive in the shadows there. Mars may already be contaminated by accident, soiling the certainty of discovering ‘life’ in the planetary zone where the swath of parameters exist for life, as we know it, to survive

@Heinrich Monroe wrote @ August 5th, 2012 at 1:56 pm

“What MSL will prove, if successful, is the basic architecture needed to support future sample collection and return.”

=eyeroll= What MSL has ‘proved’ is the costs are rising to a prohibitive point to be sustained.

Anyway, at this point, the place to analyze Martian samples is Mars, not drop a rock in a rocket and fired it back here. Mars isn’t a dead world a la Luna, baked dry full of 4.2 billion year old lunar basalt. It’s a weathered and changed world with a climate and has revealed a history of changes. Risking planetary contamination on Earth w/a Martian sample return at this point is simply absurd and shows just how myopic and self-absorbed space science minds can be.

“The Apollo program was simply too expensive to sustain any more Apollos. It wasn’t to expensive to prevent future human space flight.”

Apollo was finite from its inception and the engineering for Apollo hardware had been stretched about as far as it could go (extended stay LMs, suit and backpacks, etc.) The hardware for the cancelled Apollo 18, 19 and 20 flights was already bought and paid for- it was the ops budgets which were denied and it was a political decision to channel NASA into LEO Apollo applications projects as national budget priorities shifted.

“For goodness sake, will we ever plan programs instead of individual missions? We should be able to send a second MSL to Mars at a fraction of the cost of the first. What’s the problem?”

Because the PI (principle investigator?) is building a legacy craft. They are going to get one shot at a rover in their lifetime … will proposing to use the EXACT same EVERYTHING of a past mission even be considered?

There has to be a totally all new bells and whistles … everything has to be a one off, hand made custom piece. I have seen posts by engineers who have worked with PI’s that if they mention they could use a product “x” off the shelf that was used successfully in the past it was auto rejected.

You and I are talking at cross-purposes. You are purposely misconstruing what I am saying. Keep up the babbling. You have “established” nothing. Bye.

On earth everyone thinks of life as birds, plants, and other large scale things. However for most of the history of earth single celled bacteria are the only things present. Life starts roughly 3.8 billion years ago. Multicellular life does not appear till 1 billion years ago and simple animals till about 600 million. The land would have looked pretty barren on earth esp. as there is no ozone layer. Bacterial mats is what might be present on land. Here is what some of the earliest life forms on earth look like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites

http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/extreme/extremeheat/yellowstone.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptoendolith

When I mean temperature swings I mean the fact that say in the day it could rise to 65F around the equiater then at night plunge to -100F. Earth doesn’t do that kind of up and down.

It is known that conditions favorable for life existed in the past on mars (Both MER rovers both found environments that would have supported earth microbes). So yes the questions are: Did life ever arise? And if it did, did mars get too extreme for it to survive?

In the case of Earth the evolution of oxygen generating photosynthesis greatly changed our world. The oxygen generated caused the iron (and other minerals) that was dissolved in the waters of the earth to Settle out turning our seas blue (and the cause of many iron ore deposits around the world). It caused the creation of the ozone layer and the very oxygen we breathe. It greatly increased biological activity (Aerobic organisms can generate more energy than anaerobic ones). and allowed the formation of complex life(plants, animals, fungi, ect.). However as I mentioned earlier not all photosynthesis generates oxygen and not all autotrophic organisms (organisms that create their own food) need light to do it. However mars might not have gone that way in terms of having oxygen generating photosynthetic organisms become very dominate or if it did then conditions might have goten too extreme for them.

Admitting opium constitutes “subjugation”? A trade conflict? That’s a curious way of looking at it. It’s as I said, wherein control of tangible assets was the issue. The structure and precepts of the civilization were unchanged.

The issue was whether exploration unambiguously is needed for survival of a culture. To the extent that neither of us can come up with a rationale for that, I think my case is established.

If I have not absolutely proven that exploration is necessary for the vitality of a civilization, it can also be said that you have not proven the counterpoint either. A negative argument can not be disproved one way or the other.

And by expansion I don’t necessarily mean conquering other cultures as you imply. Conquest and expansion, though often historically coupled, are not synomymous concepts. An example of expansion without conquest would be the Vikings’ expansion into Iceland and Greenland. The descendants of Vikings in Iceland in particular being a very successful society that exists until this day. Similarly, settling a space habitat or another world would be expansion without conquest.