Slashdot Mirror
NASA Concedes Defeat In Effort To Free Spirit Rover
An anonymous reader writes "NASA has conceded defeat in its battle to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. The vehicle became stuck in soft soil back in May last year and all the efforts to extricate it have failed. NASA says that Spirit, which landed on the Red Planet over six years ago, will 'no longer be a fully mobile robot,' and has instead designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform."
Like most people on the internet, you have no idea what your talking about. NASA's funding is a fraction of what it was during the Apollo era and is doing things safer and better than ever. You think their are throwing money away at a "digital camera on wheels"? It cost ten times the money to put a man on Mars. You need to feed them, give them an atmosphere to breath to keep them alive, entertained or busy so they don't go crazy, gently land them on the planet unlike the rovers that inflate bags around them, crash into the planet and bounce off the fucker a couple dozen times. There is also that little thing about bringing them back to earth. Also, what do you expect people to do once they get to Mars? Discover life forms? Evolve to superior beings? No, they are going to take rock samples and do what the rovers are doing right now.
Frankly it would be amazing to put a man on Mars and when it does happen it will be a historic even much like the moon landing but NASA learned a lot from the moon landing and the big one was "Now that were are here, now what?" What is the point of putting people on Mars other than to be the first. They can't do much more than what robots are doing now and the cost doesn't justify the information gained.