Ares Express Issue 5
Following its prolonged absence, Ares Express is back with an extra long summary of the best forum topics to make up for it!
Following a prolonged absence that has seen Spirit and Opportunity both exceed the distance limit set by the Sojourner rover in 1997, Ares Express is back! (at least for this week). I suspect my usual excuses of perennial business and research worries will be a familiar story to readers of New Mars, so I will not go into that area. However, one of the reasons why I’ve been busy has, incredibly enough, been Mars related.
A few weeks ago I gave my Mars talk to the Oxford University Science Society. It’s a grand-sounding society that has been able to attract some stellar speakers in recent years (present company notwithstanding) but has unfortunately fallen into difficulties in persuading cynical Oxford students to attend. Luckily Mars is in everyone’s minds at the moment so through a combination of a very interesting talk title and abstract, and my press-ganging people in my college to come along, there was a very respectable turnout.
Even more pleasingly, no-one fell asleep during the talk. I’m reliably told by members of the Science Society committee that this was a highly unusual occurrence. Also unusually, there were more questions than I could take after the talk, although a depressingly high proportion of them involved me replying either, “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” or “I don’t think I agree…”
In any case, I’m happy to think that in some small way I’ve contributed to raising the level of public consciousness about Mars - which is what New Mars and the Mars Society is all about!
To make up for Ares Express’ absence over the last month, I’ve included an extra-long list of topics picked from the forums.
This Month on the Forums
– RLVs - Doomed by Moon-Mars Initiative
Forum member Ad Astra asks whether NASA has any incentive to build a reusable launch vehicle now that the focus of human space exploration has been redirected towards using expendable Crew Exploration Vehicles. The thread goes on to discuss whether there is a demand for RLVs, if they are even feasible with today’s technology, and the cancellation of the reusable RS-84 rocket engine.
– Former Astronaut Glenn Criticizes Bush Space Plan
Josh Cryer draws our attention to John Glenn’s assertion that President Bush’s space exploration plan ‘pulls the rug out from under our scientists’ and might waste too much money to ever put astronauts on Mars. This sparked off a lively debate about the utility (or lack thereof) of the ISS, whether there is any reason to assemble spacecraft in orbit, exploration outside of LEO, Moon bases, RLVs and of course Mars. It’s a veritable microcosm of the issues occupying space advocate’s minds!
The Spirit and Opportunity thread has now hurtled past the 1000 post mark and shows no signs of stopping - just like the rovers themselves, whose life expectancies have been increased from 90 days to an impressive 240 days. We’ve seen Opportunity finally pull itself away from the rock outcrop that’d been occupying its attention for almost two months and Spirit reach Bonneville crater. Lately, the thread regulars have been speculating on if and how NASA will continue to operate the rovers given their extended lifetime - and the huge costs associated with maintaining a large research team.
– Europa
The news that German scientists are developing a radioactive heating unit that could be used by a probe to melt its way through Europa’s thick ice crust to reach the ocean below revived this thread about the exploration of Europa and elicited questions about contamination (which, as is explained in the thread, are unfounded).
– Should God be Exported to Mars?
Just one look at the title might make you think that the thread is sure to have some contentious debate - which would be true, but it’s also good-humored, civilized and well worth reading by virtue of its discussion of Mars science, civlization, religion and spirituality.
After a hard day’s work trying to repair the air miner and looking at rocks, the first thing a Martian colonist will want to do after cleaning himself of dust and fines is crack open a well-earned bottle of booze. But what kind of booze will it be, and how will they make it? Have no fear - the New Mars experts are on hand in this thread to tackle this most pressing of questions to face Mars advocates.
Blasting off in a Saturn V; Re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere; or Splashdown? A poll posted by Cindy has revealed that, at the time of press, 92.31% of the New Mars electorate favours the blasting off option, a choice I can heartily endorse.
– Is Commercial Space a National Security Risk?
Bill White paints a disturbing scenario of a terrorist organization using a low cost to orbit launch system to deploy a few hundred kilos of gravel into the orbit used by GPS satellites - or indeed any orbit used by vital satellites. Should the US government allow the public sector to have access to space?
As always, this is only a selection of the most popular or interesting threads on the forums - please browse the forums to see many more posts!
Forum News
The forums broke the 30,000 post mark a few weeks ago and now sits at over 31,500 posts. We’ve been attracting a lot of new users and the user base has almost reached 800. I also added a few graphical smileys to the list that forum members can use in posts including my favourite, the smiley band!
Mars Links
A good site to view the latest rover images is Lyle.org and Oliver Morton’s MainlyMartian weblog continues to have insightful posts about space science and exploration.
Signing Off
If you’d like your website or forum thread featured on next week’s issue, just reply in the Ares Express Issue 6 thread on the forums or add a comment to this story below.
Filed under: Editorials on March 22nd, 2004
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