I think it's a folly to reduce something like this down to financial gain.

It's ultimately a kind of speculation I suppose which might allow us to learn unknown things, at the same times as advancing our engineering skills.

Put it this way it is much cheaper than the Olympics and excites me more.

 

It's not about financial gain at all. Nobody's standing to profit from this, as far as i know.

Again i acknowledge the technological achievements, but i just don't understand why such a huge price is being paid to find out something that ultimately probably won't benefit mankind in any way. To me, this is just a giant playground for NASA geeks.

 

Extremely impressive but for what? where is the gain ?

I don't understand why we need to know what used to be on Mars ??????


The yanks would gain a lot more respect throwing the money at a meal for people without food rather than making a statement that they are more clever than the Russians.

 

What's the gain for the 20 odd billion spent on two weeks of entertainment called the Olympics?

 

There always seems to be some prat or other who feels that he has to criticise any kind of sensational scientific breakthrough!

Pete is absolutely right when he praises the achievements of those who managed to build such a device which was lowered safely onto Mars in such an impressive and very difficult manner.

Running it all down in such a way will do nothing of any good of course, we might as well stand back and give those scientists and engineers all the kudos they deserve for being able to do ti.

Les

 

I think it's pretty amazing. Space is our future I firmly believe that. Shame the British Beagel 2 didn't work a few years ago but that's what happened when you build stuff cheap.

 

I blame that David Bowie.He started it all.

 

"What's the gain for the 20 odd billion spent on two weeks of entertainment called the Olympics?"

The fact that nearly a billion people can jump with joy opposed to a room full of scientists.








"There always seems to be some prat"

I'm entitled to view my opinions just like you and everyone else.. trappy.

 

You don't seem to enjoy life much do you? Why don't you get out a bit, go for a walk in the park and smell the flowers?

If you're worried about 10pence, then it's really not worth carrying on is it?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...per-medal.html

 

What a waste of taxpayers money. A question is being raised comparing nasa missions to olympics??? How many nasa missions do you know of that have kept thousands of teenagers of the streets who are out there competing in events and training hard and keeping healthy?? I dont know of any! I think spending money on kids and teenagers is a far more worthy cause than some f*cking mission to any other planet when we dont even know enough about our planet!!

 

pmsl but well said

 

How's it a waste? Its only just the start of at least a two year mission and whilst we don't know exactly what we'll find, we do know it will increase our knowledge of the solar system and its early history, provide information useful to plan a manned mission to Mars, and possibly yield evidence of life on another planet, leading to more important questions on the possibility of life throughout the universe. Not bad for the price of 1/60th of a bailout of a bank....

 

I found this quite an interesting article about the subject of space exploration. It was written at the time of the moon landings, but still relevant I think...

Why Explore Space

And back to the Curiosity rover, I found the below a great photo showing the various pieces of the decent craft in vicinity of the rover...

Nasa's Curiosity rover pictured on Mars by MRO satellite

 

Isn’t the desire to explore, discover, and expand our knowledge a human trait, essential to the concept of humanity and something that separates us from animals?

i think so, otherwise why bother, - let's just stop and live predetermined lives and not seek to discover what is over the horizon

 

you miss the point fella it flew over your head at 35000 ft,
we spend money on the games for men and women to come together from all over the world to show what they can do in sport and how the human body can be used for good, there is a vision that children will take up sport be happier in life and get fitter and not die before their parents,

LEGACY

spending billons on a mission to mars is turely fantastic and of course shows again what humans can do when they work together as a team.

but the ****ing question was , what at the end of the day do we get out of it?

i could tell you what i think but one you wouldnt like it, two you would call me a prat lol

 

I think the big question is, will they find John Carter on Mars? If not, then I'm all for prioritising stuff here on Earth...

Still, I agree it's an epic achievement.

 

How about we compare this to where else the money gets sent to. It cost $2.5b which is what the US Military spends every 33 hours and the US also spent 7 billion on crisps last year.

If we remove the church tax exemption we'd have enough money to send a rover to mars once every two weeks, forever.

Yet NASA are the bad guys....

 

What with - your council teeth?