Posted on 11/29/2012 12:16:16 PM PST by Da Bilge Troll
on... Mercury?? Wow
Let me know if they find Cilia-of-Gold.............
http://www.theaudiobookstore.com/stephen-baxter/cilia-gold-unabridged_bkatxt000009.aspx
Baxter is my favorite current SF writer.
Its damn cold in the shade.
“Too bad there’s no space programany more!”
Yep, we’re watching the wind down of stuff that was in the pipeline. Too many folks here need Obamaphones!
I sure hope the Chinese accelerate their space program to fill the void that NASA is leaving.
So, we subsidize a bunch of techno elites whose membership includes NASA’s Hansen, the rabid Global Warming Criminal, while Obama sucks the real working people of this country dry?
The question should be these days “If we ever in a snowball’s-chance-in-hell get out from under this tyrant and we can retire the debt he’s amassed, is it worth it to subsidize ideologues in ventures that won’t produce anything?”
I can think of humans going (being sent) to Mars, maybe even Mercury, but it won’t be friggin’ astronauts from NASA.
Have you read “Cilia-of-Gold”?........
better than frying in a half second I guess
” - - - Only with the continued exploration of Mercury can we hope to make progress on these new questions.”
Duh, is “Progress” in the language of Obamanation Communism now the opposite of “Forward?”
As far as the shuttle’s concerned, there was once a secret military mission launched where it seemed to me that it rolled more than usual that might have put it into a polar orbital trajectory. Then, when it retuned, the landing was such where they seemed to hold the nosewheel up for what I thought was a longer period that I had ever seen it. That led me to wonder if they hadn’t taken a dead Soviet military satellite that the Russians had lost track of out of orbit.
As for practical knowledge the shuttle returned a lot of data and information that could one day be put to use regarding long termed manned space flight such as a mission to Mars, the asteroids, or eve the moons of Jupiter or even Saturn.
Information gleaned thus far and continuing from Mars from Mars would aid in that type of mission. Plus the idea that there is, or may once have been life on Mars is still an open possibility. I’d sure like to know the answer difinitively.
I’d rather some of our tax money went to these types of projects even though it may seem that the reduction or elimination doesn’t even make a dent in our other spending.
At least we’re exploring the beyond, and to paraphrase the poem “High Flight”, “I put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
Yes, it's one one of Baxter's better early stories from the Xeelee sequence. I've read just about everything he's written.
Then you ‘get’ my reference to it in my first post!.............
As cripplecreek noted, it’s *really* cold at the poles because there is (virtually) no atmosphere. Without direct sunlight, any heat that reaches the dark craters is radiated away to the cold of empty space.
The water is thought to be formed by icy cometary impacts and/or solar wind protons reacting with oxygen on the surface. In either case, you end up with a rarified hot gas that will “bounce” around the planet until it “bounces” up and escapes gravity, or reaches the cold crater and freezes out.
A similar process occurs on the Moon for the same reason, and LRO has confirmed the presence of water in the poles in multiple ways.
MikeD, who built and aligned the UV spectrograph on LRO
Well, I’m not sure but I think it might be the biological imperative at work. Just as our ancestors pushed their technology to its limits in exploring the New World, could they help themselves and say, no, it costs too much money? Granted there was some rate of return involved though I suspect the overall balance sheet, if there ever could be one, reflected more debit than credit.
Or, perhaps it is the Romantic in me that wishes it were so, and wishing I could go sets me to dream that, for me, some small part of Heaven would be my soul’s ability to finally know...all of existence.
So I have to disagree. This is one endeavor I support, thinking as well that it takes a strongly structured and coherent society to be able to pull it of. But I guess we both see how that’s going.
Thanks always for your service. We could have been successful there too had it not been for the democrat party that pulled the plug on us.
Welcome home ...
Oh, sure. Now if we can just invent a GUT drive...
Thanks.
You too for sure.
God Bless You and Yours.
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