Horace - Like Steven says. The Explorations program gave us the rovers, Deep Impact (whose web servers were brought to their knees by the overwhelming public interest in the mission around impact time), other missions to the outer planets, comets, asteroids, etc. IOW, out where there's new places to explore and so many profoundly new and useful things to learn. It's all good science and epic discovery, and the public loves it. People are finally coming around to realizing the value of such programs while losing some of the silly Star Trek gotta-have-a-man-up-there thinking that helped drive the original manned mission efforts, yet now NASA has to cut out much of that good science to make budgetary room for the relatively poor pickings gained from new manned lunar missions per political dictate. Why not build several duplicates of the space station while you're at it - money just about as well spent. Why, we could all send our picture film to photo labs installed up there to be developed in microgravity - the grains would develop so much finer, you see.
So we're not going to Europa, a *water* planet with what looks like halophilic bacteria oozing up out of the ice. After all, the Chinese are going to the moon sometime soon and what would that do to our national pride if we let them have it all to themselves. This really burns me. - R. -----Original Message----- From: Horace Heffner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 9:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "...attempt no landing there..." On Feb 7, 2006, at 10:38 PM, Rick Monteverde wrote: > Ok fine, so we won't. Sir Arthur right again, for the wrong reason: > NASA > just whacked the exploration budget (including the first Europa > mission) > to service the idiotic political mandate of reviving the 1960's moon > missions. > > On second thought, we DO have to go back to the moon first to dig > up the > monolith, don't we... > > - R. What is this all about? Horace Heffner
