



Sources: NASA, USA Today, CNN

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RE: Just further proof...
By Gurthang on 8/7/2012 1:06:24 PM , Rating: 1
You are confusing scale here.
The Apollo program was a essentially an open check for NASA to land a man on the moon which you might have noticed is significantly closer than Mars is. And was done in little baby steps proving each part of the program was going to work as planned. And even so many people were hurt or killed in the process. This rover was so far away and there were so many variables that once started EDL was a do or die situation.

That said Appolo was a pioneering effort which advanced our space program consideribly. The point you seem to be missing is that we stopped pushing things on the manned exploration front after Apollo essentially just coasting on the space shuttle for 30 years. Things have gotten cheaper and only slightly better for manned space flight since we landed on the moon. Because we as a country having done the whole moon thing seem to be happy maintaing a RV in orbit and unwilling to fund bigger things.

A better comparison than Apollo is the Viking program. Which at the time cost 1 billion. Or about 3.9 billion in today's dollars. The viking landers could only sit like a turd where they landed, and contained only few intruments. The rovers are amazing not just in what they can do but how much science they pack into gram of vehicle.

To me the biggest failure of the MSL program was that they did not make several at once, wait for the first one to land and tweak the others slightly based on what they learn from the first one.

And finally these people are celbrating because they have spent years of their lives planng, building, designing, and operating this rover and it just completed with flying colors the the most dangerous portion of it's mission.

I don't know about you but I'd be pretty happy too.

So if you are going to doubt the moon landing why not just doubt all of NASA I mean since you can't build a spaceship and go to the moon yourself or even believe that it could be done, apparently nobody else can either. Enjoy that.. I'll continue to cheer on NASA.

