New Mars Forums

1 March 2007
SMART-1 has investigated lunar areas at the edge of Luna Incognita. This area near the lunar poles can be used for lunar science studies, or even to prepare for human bases on the Moon and on Mars.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEMEYGN0LYE_0.html
Launched in September 2003, SMART-1 ended its mission through lunar impact on 3 September 2006. The huge data sets it provided are and will be analysed by lunar and planetary scientists, and provide a very important legacy in the history of lunar exploration.

The European Space Agency
Aviation Week & Space Technology
02/05/2007, page 17

The European Space Agency will split a €329-million ($424.4-million) prime contract for Bepi Colombo Mercury mission, the agency's next major science project, between Astrium and Alcatel Alenia Space. Astrium Germany will be overall prime contractor, with Astrium U.K. and Alcatel Alenia Italy as co-primes, says Jacques Louet, ESA's director of science projects. But Astrium Germany will shoulder the full program risk under a "political expedient" approved last week by ESA's industrial policy committee. The green light for the €665-million mission is to be given by ESA's science program board later this month, along with a call for ideas for the next round of science missions planned for 2015-25. Three large (€650-million) and three medium (€300-million) missions are expected to be proposed for the tender, expected to be realized in October. The first, a medium mission, would be launched around 2017. To ensure approval, Louet said, science planners will propose €200 million in cuts through 2015. The bulk of the savings--€110 million--will come by offering to merge ESA's Solar Orbiter mission with NASA's four-satellite Sentinel project, eliminating one Sentinel and carrying the four remaining units aloft on the same launcher, with shared instrument packages.

We are not much closer to putting men in deeper space than we were at the end of Apollo. If one year worth of NASA budget were given to private space firms, it would go a lot further towards making space exploration and habitation reality.

Personally I'd like to break the back of OPEC, I get tired of the world putting their petty religious concerns and their anti-Israel bias on the pedestal. I'd like to use alternate energy as an economic weapon to get even with those Arab states for all those terrible things they did to us. I'd like to dry up their revenue stream. My primary concern is not the availablity of fuel for my vehicle, but of where the money I buy it with is going. Money is fungible. The only way of drying up that revenue tream the arabs use to fund their religious Jihad is to produce an alternate fuel that uses an alternate infrastructure that Petroleum cannot make use of. Hydrogen fits that bill. If we drive cars that consume hydrogen, then their will be less demand for oil and OPEC's revenue stream will dry up, then it will be a matter of what the OPEC nations can actually produce with their own labor rather than the amount of oil they can pump out of the ground.

Oh please. Leisure Suit Kimmy was trying to get the bomb more than a decade ago. For the same reasons. Clinton nearly went to war over it in 1993, then backed off and gave NK reactors, oil, food, and god knows what else, on the promise that the UN would watch and make sure there was no funny business. They failed. They are failing in Iran. And you know why, cause Saddam was able get away with stuff for twelve years. And now because the rest of the world fought so hard to not inforce it's own rules in Iraq, forcing us to do all of it, the madmen in NK and Iran think they can get away with murder.

I know Continental Europe hates it when Bush calls a spade a spade. I guess when you folks assume that if you can't see the tanks ready to roll over you, the world is all puppies and butterflies.

The difference is that North Korea can actually roll those tanks over south Korea. Do we honestly want to see Seoul destroyed cause that is what will happen in the first barrage of the North Koreans they have that many artillery pieces aimed at the south. Ask the soldiers what they call all those border fortresses they guard. There nickname is the speedbump for them and for a very good reason too.

And it is not the west that is giving the Norks there Oil or Food that is the Chinese and for good reason too. They have no wish for the North Korean regime to collapse its potential for regional catastrophe is far too high. Even south Korea gives lip service to the idea of a reunified Korea the cost would bankrupt the south. The North is so devestated it would make the German reunification look like a meeting of old friends

It's difficult to see a good solution to all this, the United States will beat the DPRK forces but the cosequences of military action are too costly for either side to accept. As dictator Kim goes down he could easily start hitting the South with shells or start lobbing a few missiles into the heart of Tokyo or Seoul. A biological or chemical WMD program used agressively by the North Koreans could mean the loss of 30,000 US troops. China is worried about refugees and and the US is worried about impact on its Asian bases or the world's largest economies so Kim and his cronies get to stay in power for a while, and south Korea won't have to go bancrupt trying to rebuild the South Korean Capital or rebuilding the North after it gets destroyed by US and ROK forces.