Journalist Steve Featherstone spent a crew rotation at Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, and is writing a Slate Dispatches piece on the experience. Monday’s entry is linked above, and the tabs will take you to the other posts as the week progresses. Should be good PR for Mars Society.
An Austrailian man is making a 500 km trek across the Outback to help research the psychological and physical effects of a long walk on the Moon or Mars. He is, of course, supported by the Aussie chapter of the Mars Society, though I don’t see anything about it on their website just yet.
While I see the value in this research, it’s likely going to be an underestimate of the true psychological effects and an overestimate of the physical effects. Psychologically, he hasn’t been trapped in a spacecraft for six or so months traversing the solar system, only to find he’s millions of miles away from home. Physically, Mars has only one third Earth’s gravity, and the Moon one sixth. So it’s not going to be perfect.
But it’s better than what we have now, which are anecdotal reports from people who have voluntarily chose such solitude for other reasons. I wonder if anyone has looked at that existing body yet as a sort of baseline.
Update: See also this AFP story on the project.
Recently, Ray Bradbury presented his testimony in front of the Aldridge Commission. His testimony relies primarily on an “aesthetic” argument—that the trip to Mars, and beyond, should not be about profit, or even about practicality, though those can definitely come along for the ride. Instead, expansion to Mars is the next step of discovery that has been given to us; a gift of the universe.
Pretty persuasive, I think, to us Mars Society types, but then again, we didn’t need convincing. I have to agree with Mr. Spudis that the American public won’t be so easily convinced, just based on my experience in talking to others. So it is important to push Mars not just on the Sir Edmund Hillary argument (”because it’s there”), but because Martian exploration will bring tangible benefits to humanity.
The remaining question is, what benefits are those? Comments are open for this one.
According to Yahoo! News, NASA has managed to get their accounts off by $565 billion. Obviously, this has to be fixed before they’ll be able to convince Congress that they even have a chance of making the Mars shot for what they think it will cost.
All the more reason to support private space development, I say.
First major benefit: one template and stylesheet pounds out the entire website. I guess dynamic page generation has its benefits.
So, this is another test blog, which is at MSGT Journal-Beta. While I liked Movable Type, they recently switched to a new licensing system, which pretty much means I could never update the blog from MT 2.661. This was a problem, since all the great features that were supposed to cut down on comment spam were not going to come until V3.
Also, WordPress is supposed
to be
smarter
about how to mix preformatted text and HTML formatted text
We’ll see.
This concludes Test Post #2.
Powered by WordPress