New Mars Forums

As people have said :
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Let us see if the Mars-vision was a political stunt or if there will be real projects and real cash put forward into such a trip. Mars skeptics have wondered whether NASA and the cutdown budgets are up to the job. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies that contribute to the space program are the stewards of an ailing industry, facing a brain drain as its aging engineers retire, with few newcomers entering the field.
The uncertainty about Mars has been underscored recently by official silence. Rising medicare costs, the price of war in Iraq and the jobless rates are just some of the many issues which could see NASA having another cutback. The vision has been missing from news about Mars is any mention of the dramatic proposal of the President to land humans on the Red-planet and bring them home safely. Why has there been no followup, and why the deafening silence? Since George made his initial announcement, which was greeted with some public skepticism, he has had little to say about the subject, not even mentioning it in his State of the Union address. Another problem is that a number of NASA people are unsure of the plan or have spoken against the vision with Astronaut Glenn being strongly against much of the idea for rushing to Mars.
seems like there's a lot of work to be done
As some American science writers have said successes of the Mars rovers show again why a lot can be done without spending $300-500 billion dollars, and   like many other scientists, James Van Allen, best known for the discovery of the radiation belts that bear his name, is aghast at the Mars proposal. Van Allen has been working on great projects in the past and was with folk who sent instruments to the moon Venus , Jupiter, Mars  Saturn and throughout interplanetary space to the edge of the solar system. He points to “the difficulty and the danger and the cost, all of them monstrous problems” and notes that the budget the President proposed for the project “is far too anemic to anywhere meet the need.” Van Allen is hopeful that the administration has done its homework in gleaning congressional support for the ambitious ventures.
He remembers when in 1989, Daddy-Bush that is President G.H.W. Bush in a State address spoke of returning to and staying on the moon and launching a manned-mission to the Red Planet. “That was 14 years ago and dead on arrival" in Congress, Van Allen had made such a remark and many other top scientists don't think much of the plan by Bush-jnr. So far the admin have been silent since the Bush vision to Mars was announced, costs of Iraq, a drop in industrial production and high jobless numbers may be on their minds, however like his father Bush has made a promise for Mars let's see if they even speak about it during the next four years or will the deafening silence continue ?

I heard it was the soviet umpa lumpas

http://nerdherd.gotskill.net/umpa.jpg]h … t/umpa.jpg

2012..darn that !
It's a very long time away, however i think its great they will use two craft,
two craft is always good cos if one fails there is always back up and aswell data and pics can be collected much better
the NASA twin Rovers have been doing great work on mars
and the China-ESA Double Star project TC-1 and TC-2 ( Explorer ) has also been doing very well
BepiColombo should be good. Gone will be the days when we just launch single probes into space, soon we may be launching fleets of craft to explore outerspace

???  friggin' solar winds and flares might blast the puny ESA ion-drive into no mans land

still I think the craft has done great, although it has weak power it has clocked up a lot of miles and it has compared to a quick brun rocket almost infinite thrust and fuel...it also helps push forward newer designs and new ideas for craft

cleaning up his own mess
this is new territory for a Bush leader, he has already Ambitious goals some ignoring key American issues such as rising debts, the mdei-care problems and focusing on issues like gay marraige and Stem cells, Bush has also get many Conservative Goals, GW has said "Results  matter ", and he said taht he " didn't come here just to hold the office" ...Bush said he "came here to get some things done." Many were unsure of those behind Bush and I have read remarks that called Cheney warmongering . The George W. Bush who is poised impatiently to begin his new term in the White House is a far different president from the unmarked Texas governor who arrived in Washington four years ago, with majorites as the Whitehouse and Congress he will be key to reshaping government policy to conservative design...howver it remains to be seen if these are the correct choices

Hubble should be saved because it has brought us some fantastic information and new discoveries on our universe. Unlike some such as GCNRevenger says in letting hubble get destroyed....... :down:
right now the US should push ahead in trying to save Hubble as the Europeans were strong partners in supporting hubble in space. If the US let's Hubble brun up it will send a negative message out to possible future partnetships
there is no alternative to hubble, and the US will not be able to replace it so quickly as some suggest I need not remind everyone of the safety record and the risks and tragic happenings that may occur, the world was reminded by events  such as when space shuttle Columbia broke up or the Challenger disaster, also there is the lack of financial supprot now with the cost of Iraq sucking billions out of the US economy, some say there could be more cutbacks in the future due to rising debts and rising medicare costs...
There is a replacement due for Hubble the James Webb Space Telescope but it won't get going for a long time, so astronomers will be back in the dark again and the JWST will only see in the visible spectrum. With large funding needed for the Bush vision to Mars some expect cut backs on other projects in the future such as JIMO and JWST, as newscientits and nationalgeographic once wrote -
once Hubble fails scientists could be back in the dark ages for some time

Next one...2008
Be ready for Cheney ( Mr Apartheid ) as president
and the little hispanic dictator George Prescott Bush as VP
The Bush dynasty will continue....

Some don't just smell a Lawsuit with people ready to sue, others see a REAL case going on here

The ballots are replaced with Diebold electronic voting machines which leave no paper trails
CEO of Diebold INC., “attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors known as Rangers and Pioneers at the president’s Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month.” The next week, he invited guests to a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for the Ohio GOP at his mansion in the Cleveland suburbs. This is the man whose machines have no paper trail and will be used by at least 8 million voters in the upcoming election. Ohio voters got a jolt when Walden O'Dell, CEO of Texas-based electronic voting-machine maker Diebold Inc. (and a big Bush fund-raiser), pledged "to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to the president." California authorities have said they plan to sue Diebold. Attorney General Bill Lockyer last month said he would sue Diebold, alleging that it defrauded the state with false claims.

Election time : A second location, 1901 W. Girard Ave., Berean Institute, Philadelphia, Pa, had 300+ votes already on 2 machines at start of day... INCIDENT: 292 votes on machine at start of day; WARD/DIVISION: 7/7: ADDRESS: 122 W. Erie Ave., Roberto Clemente School, Philadelphia, Pa.; INCIDENT: 456 votes on machine at start of day; WARD/DIVISION: 12/3; ADDRESS: 5657 Chew Ave., storefront, Philadelphia, Pa... MORE... A gun was purposely made visible to scare poll watchers at Ward 30, division 11, at 905 S. 20th St., Grand Court. Police were called and surrounded the location... Developing...

As one paper put it - Could it be that our politicians find it un-American to admit humanity and self-criticism? After all, the reality of our underclass cannot be summarily dismissed, nor deemed invisible. It is cynically funny that as we get close to November 2 we become concerned with electoral fraud, the debut of those “Diebold-ical” machines from Ohio , and the spectacle we are giving the rest of the world. Here we are, supposedly a first rate democratic superpower, behaving no better than an abused democracy in a third-world nation.
-in a surprising moment of candor, Diebold Inc. chief executive Walden O'Dell will admit, "Yeah, we probably could have been more subtle about that one, but we decided, what the hell? It's not like anybody can do anything about it." The Democrats will then bend over.

The E vote was thought to speed thinsg up. Linda Schade, a member of TrueVoteMD and the Green Party, begs to differ. While the group failed to block e-voting in Maryland, it is now fighting in court for the right to send monitors into polling precincts around the state.
"The use of paperless electronic voting in Maryland has been marred by serious problems," Schade said. "It is clear these machines need to be watched closely. We now know that in the last election, people received incomplete ballots missing candidates, machines failed to boot, technicians without identification worked on machines making undocumented alterations. The State Board of Elections told the media and the public that the machines worked flawlessly, but since then local boards of elections have reported widespread problems."

compared with electronic vote-rigging. A number of computer experts have testified that they “have been able to hack into both Diebold’s and Sequoia Voting Systems’ voting machines” that are being used in the presidential race. Abbie Waldman Delozier and Vickie Karp, of Black Box Voting and the National Ballot Integrity Project Task Force respectively, confirmed this at a National Press Club conference in Washington in late September. Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting, said: “We are able to use a hidden program for vote manipulation, which resides on Diebold’s election software. This is a hidden feature enabled by a two-digit trigger (not a ‘bug’ or an accidental oversight; it’s there on purpose).” Dr Herbert H Thompson, computer security expert and editor/author of twelve books, including How to Break Software Security, explained how easily an election could be rigged by implanting a virus, while Jeremiah Akin, an independent computer programmer from Riverside, California, has shown how to manipulate Sequoia Voting Systems software just before an election by switching the labels on the names of candidates.

Given the degree of antagonism that has gripped America as a result of Bush’s policies, neither side is prepared to give an inch this time. A number of American commentators have warned of catastrophic consequences if there is no clear-cut winner. America’s system of electoral colleges is also seen as deeply flawed: people do not elect the president directly; in each state the candidate who is “first past the post” takes all the electoral seats. Colorado, with nine electoral college seats, has introduced a proposal to have its seats allocated on the basis of proportional representation. This could lead to legal challenges and the outcome being uncertain for several months.

San Diego County officials were dismayed after the primary to learn that Diebold vote-tabulation software had misawarded thousands of absentee votes for Sen. John Kerry to Rep. Dick Gephardt, who had dropped out of the race.

He was talking about outer space again, I saw it yesterday even on the net.  Kerry referred to Florida's space industry and said he's going to create more work... jobs I want to create are the ones that come out of science and technology. Kerry’s approach would be to preserve NASA’s traditional “balanced” approach to a diverse research agenda that would include restoring its now-threatened aeronautics budget. The paper also labels the Bush plan an un-funded “political stunt.” One person wrote after ' alarm at another Bush term stems from such issues as the move from a multi-trillion-dollar surplus to a multi-trillion-dollar deficit, two costly tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, and the simultaneous budget-breaking foray into Iraq that has stretched our military thin and diverted us from other dangers.' John Kerry has overseen NASA for years as a member of the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee, part of the Senate Committee for Commerce, Science and Transportation. As such, he is more aware of the agency and its issues than most. (Bush, on the other hand, is reported never to have visited the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston during his time as governor of Texas.) Kerry has also advocated a project on the scale of Apollo to end the country’s energy dependency, which further demonstrates an appreciation and commitment to technology that he is likely to bring to office.

there is some more news coming out Florida E-Voting in Doubt
, Diebold Integrity Questioned. Looks like another re-count and court battle. Leaked memos revealing more security flaws . California authorities have said they plan to sue Diebold Electronic Systems, Diebold knowingly sold the state shoddy electronic voting machines that put its elections at risk ?

That's a popular South Korean newspaper

If it was a North.Korean you'd really know about it, there would be lots of propaganda on the website and it would be declaring it's new plans for the building of weapons in the next few weeks and more or less screaming death to America, they are crazy. I won't go into it because I've already posted on this issue in the U.S election thread

Some of the S.Korean newspapers are good, some are very different to each other. they can have very socialist or liberal writers, they sometimes see the people who came from the Western powers and the Soviet/Communist areas as an obstacle to the area Korea ever becoming one nation and one people. I recall some South Korean papers were very vocal on some issues like  two U.S. soldiers involved in an accident that killed two girls.

Saddam was pretty much a petty dictator, he was once a force but the first gulf war and years on sanctions pretty much left him a miserable tyrant, Saddam was just one of many madmen rulers around the globe in fact he was maybe one of the weaker ones are certainly no direct danger to the USA.  UN chief weapons inspector certainly didn't like the way Bush went about his business and he even lashed out at the ' b*stards '  in the Whitehouse on the conduct of the Iraq operation.  In an extraordinary departure from the diplomatic language with which he has come to be associated, Mr Blix assailed his critics in both Washington and Iraq.
:down: another bad result for Bush :rant:
Meanwhile there are other tyrants, other mad nations and other dictators who know that the US army is pushed to a limit, they know the USA will be stuck in Iraq for a while so they are doing all the bad stuff while America is pre-occupied with the hole of despair in Iraq.  Many officials now suspect Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon, Earlier, Iran and the European Union failed to agree on getting Tehran to suspend all uranium enrichment activities.  There was mention of a report which stated where they have developed a missile with the range of 1,250 miles. Another concern is that Iran has been getting together three nuclear submarines.Those subs are capable of staying submerged for 60 days and capable of launching nuclear missiles . There is also the question if the administration has enough dollars to back the Iraq operation, he has seen a massive rise in health care, the prices of oil have skyrocketed, and unemployments numbers are soaring. Iran knows that the Us might not be able to afford another battle as the cost of Iraq has been killing the US economy
Meanwhile North Korea has been shouting out loud. Some would think that the North Koreans have serious anger and issues against the likes of the European and Chinese, however the madman in charge sees the USA as its number one enemy. Sadly there is only so much the likes of the EU and China can do, they can tell North Koreas leader to stop but it is unlikely that such a dictator will listen to reason. In a series of statements  Japanese-borne expert on North Korea's military has stated in the past that North Korea has  hydrogen bombs the  Dr. Kim asserts that the nukes will strike American cities if the Bush administration imposes economic sanctions or other hostile moves against North Korea. There is a clear contrast in a US policy of pushing North Korean nuclear disarmament and a Kim policy of developing nuclear weapons for self-preservation. North Korea reportedly has ICBM's ready that can loft a nuclear payload to the east coast of the United States. Some reports say the regime has a Taepo Dong 1  and the Taepo Dong-II ICBM currently and plans to build more. CIA Director George Tenet warned Congress that North Korea had developed its long-range Taepodong-II ICBM to the point where it was capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to North America. But the media were so busy trumpeting spurious administration stories about Iraq’s mythical chemical trucks—a.k.a. “Winnebagos of death”—that they barely noted Tenet’s deeply alarming revelation. The State Department's top arms control official says North Korea is "the world's foremost proliferator of ballistic missiles and related technology to rogue areas.
Meanwhile things don't look so good in Iraq, Call it the WMD-lite scandal: the disappearance of 380 tons of dual-use explosives in Iraq. Certainly Republican Machiavelli-in-charge Karl Rove didn't see this surprise coming - hitting the Bush administration like a jet converted into a missile. So this is the crucial point in the whole affair: the Pentagon - as well as the IAEA - knew the 380 tons were stored at al-Qaqaa, but US troops didn't make any move to search for them or secure them, because this was not a priority at the time. On Friday Edwards said, "We know that the weapons were there before the invasion. We know that the president was told they needed to be secured once the invasion occurred. We know that the president did not order that they be secured, and we know that now they are missing. "So regardless of the timing when they disappeared, we know they're gone and we know the president was supposed to secure them and he didn't do it. This week White House spokesman Scott McClellan all but admitted that securing Iraq's oil fields and the Ministry of Oil was a much higher priority than securing 345,000kg (760,000 pounds) of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives around (less than one pound blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland). In itself, this admission blows up the Bush administration's whole case for invading Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It seems no matter who gets elected there's a whole lot of work to do. :down:  :rant:

The U.N. nuclear agency warned that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives that can be used in the kind of bomb attacks that have targeted U.S.-led coalition forces for months. Clark just remarked on Giuliani statement 'For President Bush'
when Bush went to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the 'actual responsibility' for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly. There's more on  Mr-Apartheid Cheney, a 6 billion dollar contract and cash stolen. The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co is it any wonder Iraq is killing the US economy. It elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the administration showed favoritism to VP Dick's former company, he has had a strange record in the past some say he's still unhappy happy Mandela got out alive ? On the missing explosives in Iraq, the IAEA was told about the loss over two weeks ago, Dr ElBaradei said, but he had hoped to give US forces and Iraqi officials time to try to recover the missing explosives before the matter became public knowledge. However there are other issues in the election such as how well the Florida process will run, before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. via Florida Computers Snatch Thousands of Votes From Kerry
Less on stolen votes and more on the stolen explosives . The IAEA has just said ' It is certainly of concern to us that this material that could have such a potential danger and be so devastating could have gone missing '