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Mars Rovers on New Missions
mycro writes "According to CNN, the Mars rovers are on a brand new mission. Because the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers are in such great condition and 'keep going and going', NASA will be using them for a longer period of time to study water, rocks, and formations on Mars." An anonymous reader writes "Today NASA has given its Opportunity rover a green light to enter the steep Endurance crater. Looking at deeper martian bedrock layers is considered now a rich enough science payoff to weigh favorably against the real chance that the rover cannot get back out of the crater."
Also every action the rovers take place them in danger, so there's risk associated with every day of their existance - if they get stuck, it's not like there's anyone there to pull them off a rock or turn them back over.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".
Why do these comments always come up when NASA's budget is neglible compared to others? In the big picture, NASA's funding has given them a hard time to find things already, since the government need the money for military funding. Oops, weren't you just argumenting against these things?
The Federal Pie Chart
NASA gets in total $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2004. Compare that to the billions in the pie chart above.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
a) the thing blows up in launch before you get it out into space. = some shit on the bottom of a sea bed somewhere (yes I know there is little risk of it going into the atmosphere.)
They're in really, really tough boxes. If your booster explodes, you comb through the debris, find the RTG still intact in its box, and recycle it --- they're expensive. (This has actually happened.)
b) you get nuclear waste "stuck" somewhere on top of a rock.
It's in a really, really tough box. It's not going anywhere and it won't leak.
c) you use a shortcut with nuclear fuel. Sure it might be better "now" but in principle running things of solar is damned fine engineering. Not only that, but any tech advancements that are made for space (remember the public is paying for all your little space toys, while people starve no less) can filter down to people everywhere.
I'm sorry, this paragraph makes no sense. RTGs are made of nuclear fuel, that's how they work. Yes, solar panels are good engineering, but RTGs are far more suitable for solving the job at hand. Yes, the public is paying, but space exploration is a pathetically tiny amount of money compared to what's spent on welfare or the armed forces, and the extra knowledge gained by extending the lifespan of the probe probably outweighs the (tiny) extra expense. Yes, technology trickles down, but solar panels are fundamentally only useful for certain specialised tasks on Earth, and they're approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency anyway; there are a lot of tasks for which RTGs --- even on Earth --- would be really handy. And there isn't any research being done into those because people think 'nuclear' rhymes with 'evil'.
I'm afraid everything you've said indicates that you've bought into the anti-nuclear propaganda. Try doing some research and getting an opinion of your own.