Curiosity decelerated from 13,000 mph as it hit the Martian atmosphere to 2 mph in about seven minutes using a heat shield, a parachute and a retro-rocket that dangled the rover gently above the Martian surface and then cut loose at the last second. The rover landed a couple hundred yards from its intended landing spot after traveling eight months and 350 million miles.
People who keep saying that government in general is incompetent and can't do anything right don't know what they're talking about. The US military and NASA are perfect examples of government agencies that can accomplish the impossible with that old-fashioned can-do American attitude.
Even after getting hammered by the terrible human disasters of the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger explosion in 1986, the disintegration of the Columbia over Texas, and the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, NASA soldiered on, landing on the moon, completing the shuttle's mission, and landed three more rovers on Mars.
There's no reason why the rest of government can't have similar successes, if our politicians would quit using the people who work there as political whipping boys and just let them do their jobs.
5 comments:
Who actually built the orbiter and the rover? Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The govt paid for it, but they didn't build it!
Right. And that means that government spending helped to create jobs and innovate.
Space exploration is going commercial rather than just being an artifact of Cold War politics. Contrary to the last two Administrations - it makes no sense to run a manned mission to Mars.
But I do agree that this is cool science.
Shouldn't we have spent that Mars money to do something for the children?
It's an admirable achievement and I have hopes that it will make important new discoveries. However, you (yet again) let fly with your silly assumption that if government has done it, then that's necessarily a big positive on their score card. I don't know anyone, certainly no one on this site, that says government can't do anything. That's one of your moldiest old strawmen. Of course government can do things. There are things that only governments can do effectively, but that doesn't mean that even at those few things, that it doesn't do them stupidly or at ridiculous expense. Yes, we landed on the Moon, but the Apollo program was a dead end. Von Braun's approach would've been slower, but we would've had a lot more to show for it at the end. The shuttle was another sort of dead end that drifted onward long after it should've been ended, largely because we had nothing to replace it with, and a good part of the reason for that was because it was a black hole that consumed so much of NASA's resources. Of course, part of the reason for that is because NASA is so hugely inefficient. Given sufficient money, any bureaucracy can continue to "soldier on", but that doesn't mean it necessarily should, or that at least some of the jobs it may be doing aren't jobs that could be done better in other ways.
Amtrak can continue to "soldier on", but ... really? They lose something like $7.50 on each $9.00 hamburger they sell. Amtrak motto: "We waste your money!" But let's just let them do their jobs...
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