Comment Re:Thank goodness (Score 4, Interesting) 870
I'm a huge fan and proponent of robotic exploration of the solar system. NASA, JPL, the aerospace contractors and their partners in universities across the world have done an amazing job with comparitively tiny sums of money. Alan Stern (the head of NASA's Space Science Directorate who resigned when his plan to make visible the pain caused by the massive cost over-runs on MSL by shutting down the Spirit MER rover was overruled by higher-ups) has recently pointed out that routine cost overruns are crippling NASA. Ares and Orion show every sign of following this trend, and for what? To keep alive the fallacious dream that seems rather too popular that Star Trek is a plan for future space exploration, rather than an entirely traditional drama turned to SF by the addition of magic impulse drive / dilithium crystal devices. When we've done a robotic Mars sample return, which although fiendishly hard to accomplish is infinitely more practical than doing a manned mission), let's talk about Moonbase Alpha or whatever. (And whilst we're at it, for god's sake abandon the ISS, the most expensive white elephant ever to wreck astronomical observations.)
