AP/Jeffrey Phelps
The victims of yesterday's shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
The GOP releases the names of some of the RNC speakers (but not the big one).
Sen. Mark Kirk releases another video showing his progress in rehabilitation from his stroke.
Syria's prime minister gets fired. Or did he defect?
Was Hillary Clinton chased by bees in Malawi?
NASA's "Curiosity" rover survives its 7 minutes of terror to land on Mars, making one Mohawked flight director an internet star, and causing a full-on JPL FREAKOUT!
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This is a GOVERNMENT PROGRAM that works. We can trace many of today's computers and devices to NASA. And to the know nothings that decried the end of the shuttle program, this is the next phase. Men and women will eventually be back in space, but for now robots will serve us.
God Bless the USA and those scientists who allow us to be great.
It's like watching 2001 in real life.
Epic science FTW! That was amazing to watch. I only wish I could have been with the crowd in Times Square.
But hey, I did make a geeky little photo to celebrate.
1.Sikhs are often mistaken for muslims- why does the caption say the motive was unclear? But that's not the real point .............
2. Mistaking Sikhs for Muslims is like mistaking cyclists for Orthodox Jews, because they both wear headgear. Christians and Muslims have far more in common than Sikhs and Muslims, though that's not the real point either ..............
3. Responsible gun owners are probably as sickened by this (and Aurora, and Gabby Giffords, and all the others) as the rest of the country. Reasonable gun control advocates aren't worried about responsble hunters and markmen/women with hunting and or target shooting weapons. The NRA is in a weakened position at this juncture, and if reasonable control advocates joined with responsible gun owners to curtail access to military and other murderous weapons, while simultaneously reaffirming Second Amendment rights to responsible and reasonable gun ownership, the NRA's bullying would be neutralized.
None of these massacres could have been committed with fists, or bludgeons, or knives, or bows & arrows. When will this country (and responsible gun owners are part f the mainstream of this country) come to its senses?
I was delighted to see a good number of women in the room. Obviously still more men than women, but I'm old enough to remember TV images of similar rooms back during the Mercury, etc. missions, and it was 100% men back then.
Girls growing up now will know in their bones that they can grow up to be rocket scientists - or anything else they damn well please.
Curiosity stuck the landing! Gold for NASA!
Mars + Miracle "Marsacle", The new definition of miracle created to adequately describe the "Mars Curiosity" landing, a remarkable and courageous feat in this age. New things can be tried, they can be complex, that can be hard, that can take time, saying no, no, no as battle cry is worse than not trying.
The entire NASA team for the Mars Curiosity project has won the Gold Metal, noting that Olympus Mons is a very big mountain
And the "Silver Metal goes to, stop already ... to taking this picture ...
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/06/13146951-mars-orbiter-captures-rover-in-midair?chromedomain=cosmiclog&lite
Adam Steltzner, lead of the Entry Descent and Landing team had this great reflection on the communitarian spirit of collective achievement in the first press conference after the landing.
(Totally unrelated question) If we can maintain a continuous rover exploration presence on Mars for 8 years, it seems to me can't we figure out how to get Rachel a desk that does not visibly flex every time she puts her weight on it? I feel almost as if she is in danger from cracking through it. Plus the studio light reflections on the surface betray what a POS it is. Isn't there some wild new substance that is much better than plexiglass for this sort of thing.... Oh yeah. Glass.
Found it. The first new Conference is here_
Here's a transcript of Steltzner's remarks. They reminded me of a recent Spike Lee video of the Hoover Dam with our Rachel expressing the sentiments that Elizabeth Warren and the President talk of when they speak of American greatness: "You can’t be the guy that built this, you can’t be the town that built this, you can’t even be the state that built this. You have to be the country that built something like this. "
@28:07 in this Youtube of first Nasa News conference after Curiosity MSL rover landing.
Remarks by Adam Steltzner, EDL lead:
Scott Hubbard, former Ames Research Center director and currently Stanford professor of astronautics and aeronautics stated: "For every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit."
The problem is that returns from these investments go directly into the US treasury. As Joan Vernikos (former director of NASA’s Life Sciences Division) pointed out: "Royalties on NASA patents and licenses currently go directly to the U.S. Treasury, not back to NASA. I firmly believe that the Life Sciences Research Program would be self-supporting if permitted to receive the return on its investment." (source, both quotes)
Yet Congress is not interested in national projects or supporting self sustaining technology programs.
Because the US has no further approved lander missions in the pipeline, it will be several years before we will see another Mars landing, if ever. That's a mistake, because the 2 billion spent on this project was money spent largely in the US on increasing US technology, and employing US middle class workers generating lots more high tech US jobs. If Hubbard is right, the Curiosity mission generated $16 billion for the US economy from an investment of $2 billion.
An investment like that is a no brainer.