Harvesters? Mmm, some spice would be a good discovery, but those probes had better watch out for sand worms!

Esquilax

============================================================
Ach, ye speak like a poet, but ye punch like one too! - Willy

In attempt to mitigate my embarrassment, may I offer the following;

The Best of 2003: Top 10 Astronomy Images

Enjoy!

Note: This was supposed to be edited into the above post. My apologies, it has been a looong day.

Esquilax

============================================================
Ach, ye speak like a poet, but ye punch like one too! - Willy

Edited by - esquilax on 1/4/2004 4:50:46 PM

@Arcon, cc Taw:

I meant the lunar rover kind. Thanks for pointing that out (NOT). And, erm, well, OK the Rover cars still have the ol' UJ on its badge but...erm... who owns them now, eh?

Well if this is a waste of money why bother spending ANYTHING at all on ANY space exploration? Let's just cobble together something that might fly right and send some live humans out there to make a go of it as best as they can. I'd like to know how you would expect to get anyone to spend any kind of money to send people out there without first showing the powers that be what to expect?

Besides, what do you really care about the cost in the end It's not your tax money that paid for it anyway. Sheesh!

@indy: The Pheonix Consortium owns Rover. Its like the last British car company left. Bought for a tenner i think off BMW. Thank god.

Its not that tax money is going towards this, thats not why i'm pissed. The reason i AM pissed is that they could be doing SO much more. I mean theyre taking baby steps when they could really be going places with Mars. Like setting up a communications array in orbit, or spy sattelites, or relay stations to boost signals, or survey satelites that can discover whats in the ground from space. I mean for the moment, sod putting a man on mars, put a man in ORBIT of mars.

I'm pissed because i wanted to go to another planet in my lifetime, or at least for mankind to do it, and if we dont get up there soon, i'm not gonna forgive the worlds governments for spending more money on ****ty new weapons systems than exploring the galaxy. If we'd have done away with war back when Japan did, whats the bet we'd be alot better off and probably alot further off this planet.

Ever since i was a TINY little guy, i always wanted to go in space. Its what got me into science fiction, its what got me into space sims like the Lancer Series and its whats pissing me off now because we have the goddamn technology and money to do it, but instead we waste millions on ****ty little probes to do what humans should be doing. Why should the space race be the only time we would want to break boundries amd push back frontiers. Hell, i'd love for Russia to announce a second cold war so we can at least have SOME kinda reason to go into space again.


"Something wicked this way comes"

@Arcon:

If I had my 'druthers, they'd be spending much more on space as well. But, of late, NASA has not been faring well on the public relations front. It all started in the 1980s, Congress started to question the utility of spending all that money on space. Successive presidencies have slowly but surely, taken money away from NASA and, to make efficiencies count, NASA did what should have been expected but was shocking nonetheless, they took short cuts. Lives were lost. A massive political no-no for any government sponsored civilian activity deploying oodles of tax payers money.

On the other hand, I still cannot understand why they haven't bought the Russian rocket motors lock stock and barrel. Runs on kerosene and out performs on thrust AND costs way less than those hydrogen and peroxide burning monsters we've got.

Many things frustrate. You think your disappointed? As they say in my town, take a number and get in line.

BUT I will take whatever achievements that can be had.

Wait 'til they get pics of these folks!


http://shortcuttoaliens.tripod.com/aliens/id6.html

http://www.teegeeack.com/alien-ufo-secr ... nding.html

Jose Chavez: "Trent! It's good to see my kind of scum."

i swear to god, if you keep posting this crap in every post you make with bull**** and a link, someones gonna lose their temper big time. How about, i dunno, WORKING a link. Or better yet, stick a bit more of a synopsis about what were gonna see. And another thing, stop creating threads about crap you just read or saw on a website and thought we'd actually give a ****


"Something wicked this way comes"

why bother spending money on space exploration indeed? years ago i used to be so keen on space exploration, I believed it was mankinds future, all that stuff. i used to sit and watch the Apollo missions, Skylab, the first shuttles, soaked it all up, had the models, wanted to be a cosmonaut, oh you name it i did it or tried it.

ideas change as you get older though and now i think it's a terrible waste of money and resources, and achieves sweet fa. Great we can sample a few bits of soil on Mars. Does that feed starving millions in the Third World, cure disease, prevent pollution, in fact anything thats any use at all? i don't think so.

I'm not saying there should be NO space activity. Stuff like the Hubble is great because that really extends knowledge and gives Kimk something to do, all the weather satellites etc are important even though the weather men pay them no attention (absolutley no hurricanes whatsoever) GPSS-Navstar is a godsend for people like my Mrs who can't read maps, and of course we could fairly easily make space factories for vaccines, micro-electronics, precison machinery, transforming battle-robots etc.

I'm sorry but unless there is some practical gain or significant extension of knowledge, i don't see the point. These space probes and stupid Lego robots that are always breaking or getting lost are a waste of time and money, even if they work they rarely add anything of any great value. Sorry to be a miserable b*ring b*st*rd but space just doesn't interest me much anymore; except the X-Project, now that's interesting!

Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/5/2004 5:13:33 AM

No no you got it the other way around: develop space travel *coughwarptechnologycough* find the aliens *coughVulcanscough*, and make them end the famine and the poverty etc.

silly me! I should have thought of that.

tisk..tisk.. shoulda called for me earlier.
what have they discovered on mars (equilax)
gullies, (seas are on the moon, also on mars) and mount moa (i think i got this bit wrong) biggest volcano in the system(i got that one right)
and they also found that

mars has river like things

This picture from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor could help settle a decades-long debate about whether the planet had long-lasting rivers instead of just brief, intense floods. The image of the delta-like fan shows eroded ancient deposits of transported sediment long since hardened into interweaving, curved ridges of layered rock. Scientists interpret some of the curves as traces of ancient "meanders" made in a sedimentary fan as flowing water changed its course over time.

"Meanders are key, unequivocal evidence that some valleys on early Mars held persistent flows of water over considerable periods of time," said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, which supplied and operates the spacecraft's Mars Orbiter Camera.Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

**from Nasa**

then, from my own references...
i may be wrong, since mars isn't really the greatest area of interst for me (its for nasa)
but.. i know that they've also got dirt devils ? forgot the exact term they use.. that are up to 15km high, hundreds of kilometres long.... continuous.. sweeping the martian reddish surface like it was some kinda post nuclear desert.

then.. of course those up at nasa and various other places think mars might have had life on it.
what i think, is that they might have had species simliar to that of our own but with faster development of science, and higher idiocy capacity, and hence inevitably wiped themselves off the surface - but thats just me.

da astronomer

actually that pic just looks like bad plastering. sort of like the plastering I do. so Mars looks like my cruddy plastering. well that was really worth spending billions on wasn't it?

What's the big deal about going to mars anyway? It's not practical to send any thing back (if there were even anything to send) and we don't exactly have the tech level to terraform the place. Personally I say head for the asteroids. HUGE, free chunks of metal, minerals, ice, etc. just floating around doing not much. Slap some engines on one, orbit it around the earth, hollow it out, instant space station. First there would be the obvious step of developing a means to destroy/divert rogue rocks however. Wait...shouldn't we be smart enough to be doing that ALREADY?!?!?!?! How many near misses does it take before someone gets the point? Shouldn't someone figure out how to protect our own back yard before we got zipping around like maniacs? And before it gets said, I think it might take just a little more than several ICBMs to get one of those things to change course. Yes I've seen Armegeddon (the movie), no I didn't give it any credit for reality. This may seem a bit paranoid, but can you dispute it?

Yay! Welcome back again Kimk!

I had no idea Taw could be such a curmudgeon. How did you put with all of his anti-space grunts and groans all this time?