^ First I looked at the picture-hmm red as usual nothing special with that picture-Hey what's that?? Ohh it's him, let us send Bugs Bunny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAcsoTBWd7w

Markus

America may no longer be into manned space flight like before but they are doing the world proud as far as Mars is concerned...haven't been this interested for a few years now.

Having been around then and glued to the TV set, I can see the network's side of it. Even Apollo 11 coverage consisted of many hours of staring at the TV screen watching nothing happening. *I* happened to like it as I am a space nut, but for normal air breathing humans, it would have been better to have shown normal TV and just interrupted when stuff happened.

But then the networks had never had such an event and they did what they thought was best.

By the time 12 was over, the citizens were frankly bored with watching nothing for hours and rightfully preferred their normal TV with breaking news.

Most things about space travel, even short distances to the moon consist of hours of just drifting along.

For example, from the time the Assent module lifted off from the moon until it docked with the CM 3.5 hours elapsed. That was covered live on TV. 3.5 hours of watching a bright dot (AM) from a camera in the CM.

That was just one small segment of the entire mission. Now imagine watching that twice (Apollo 11 and 12) and I think it can be understood why people got bored.

Good point.

"The Space Channel is carrying live coverage of the full Curiosity mission! Only five more months of pictures of stars until the landing! Then, if all goes well, several years of telemetry signals with occasional exciting discussions about the soil experiment's latest finds!"

Actually that exists... :O:
^Link to the live stream from the camera mounted outside the ISS. :03:

Cool picture. And boring, like everybody was saying. I could look at that maybe once a day, for a minute or so. On the other hand I might download one if I thought it was cool enough. On the other other hand the quality isn't that good, and one can probably find much better pictures floating around the web. On the...well, you know...I usually have pictures of World War One ships on my desktop.

Just seen these pretty cool pictures.

http://media.skynews.com/media/image...-1-942x530.jpg
http://media.skynews.com/media/image...-1-522x293.jpg
http://media.skynews.com/media/image...-1-522x293.jpg

I watch that almost every day. Boring most of the time, but at times you
can see some very nice scenery. :yep:

First color 360-degree panorama from Curiosity:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/6...16029_full.jpg
(3 653px × 755px)

Beautiful, just beautiful. :yep:

Indeed. :yep:

Can't wait to see the stuff they start showing later on. From Bad Astronomer:

It is surprising even for myself how much that 100+ MB photo panorama from Mars that I had linked a couple of weeks ago, has changed my attitude to Mars. The image back then, like the new ones these days, show a desolate, dry, desert place very far away, compoletely out of reach for ordinary human contact. Complete isolation. The 100+ MB image did so with huge detail, and panorama, it really sucked the observer into the landsape, so to speak.

And to me this had a very disillusionising effect. I have lost my fascination for Mars, it seems. I asked myself: is this a place I would go to, that I would accept risks to reach, and do so only to see this? There were times when i would have said: yes.

I did not like that image. It was lonely, bleak, and the grim charactewr even was increased by the knowledge that on the whole planet there is no life form, no human being, no animal, no nothing. You would be as alone as "alone" can mean.

It really has healed me from the romantic transfiguration that many of us - including myself - suffer from when it comes to Mars. Maybe that is because the level of detail and the size of that pic did not leave any room anymore for illusions and fantasies about what it is about: a place isolated, dry, lonely, grim, out of touch with human dimensions of living and experiencing any form of consolation and friendliness and company.

I feel a loss, a loss of old fantasies and ideals and images, the fascination for the red planet. But I am also thankful for it. I now see how much my attitude towards Mars missions was based on illusions and out-of-touch idealisations of what it is about.

Would I go there, if given the opporutnity to go there, and even return? No, Not for all money in the world. I fail to see a point in it anymore.

The technological skill and ability of what is being demonstrated now, is impressive. No doubt about that. But the magic I once attributed to such projects, is gone. And think that is a healthy thing.

Entzauberung.

The factor of Mars is not what is there, but what was there and what could be there in the future. Was there once life? Can we build a new world on Mars?

Sure, it's not exactly a Goldilocks planet, but when you need the room then you're not picky about where you make it.

That is just abstract, academic interest only, not the vivid imagination the fascination for Mars throughout the past centuries lives by. I do not deny it. But I say it is not the same, it does not compare.

And I do not subscribe to the "certain" future of colonies and large-scale mining and huge populations in Mars in the future. There are not only many problems on Earth putting such ambitions into question, but there are also many issues on Earth of much smaller logistical challenge where we already fail. Before Mars, comes Moon. And even for the Moon I am somewhat pessimistic.

And no, I am also no longer fascinated by the idea of walking on the Moon. The idea of doing that to me has more qualities of a nightmare now. The answer is simple. My home is planet Earth. Not Mars. Neither the Moon. Earth is where life is. Warmth. Comfort. Consolation. Company.

This dark abyss out there becomes the more frightening for me the more I learn and occupy my mind with it. Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

We have two stark choices though, grow or die. It's been the same with nearly every advanced civilization in history, and we're going to run out of room and resources on this planet within the next two hundred years (if not sooner) at our current rate of consumption. Plus you have to factor population growth into that, unless of course we level out with 'Peak Child' but even so there will still be a massive increase in the consumption of resources as poorer countries catch up with the developing ones.
We really may not have a choice but to get footfall on the Moon and Mars.
Furthermore, the more widespread we are, the harder it will be to destroy human civilization or put it back into the dark ages. Right now, all it would take would be a well placed asteroid or virus and blam, game over. Thousands of years of progress down the drain. When Rome fell, the knowledge of the Roman empire was destroyed in Western Europe and it fell into the Dark Ages, but in Byzantine, the knowledge was kept. Mars would be our Byzantine, a backup in case something goes horribly wrong on Earth.

We have faced monsters before, once upon a time we feared putting to sea in case it swallowed us whole, and it frequently did, but we kept trying, and we grew and conquered our fears of the sea.

We have to face our fears of space and grow...or we might as well just push the button and nuke ourselves into oblivion now and get it over and done with.