I was logged into NASA TV Sunday night and watched the people in mission control start jumping and screaming when they received that little text message. Very cool. I read somewhere that Curiosity won't be all checked out and ready to go for about 10 days.

I was playing a gig in a bar in North Hollywood when we landed on the moon. Actually I don't think we had started yet, we were there setting up. We were all glued to the little 21" TV listening to Uncle Walter. Everybody there including us, the staff and the drunks all cheered.

One reason NASA's budget gets cut is the incredible cost overruns for everything. And the very expensive and embarrasing incompetence. Remember the Hubble when it was first launched and it beamed back the first pics and they were blurry? How about that other Mars mission where somebody forgot to do a metric to miles conversion and it entered the Martian atmosphere way too steep and crashed? Several billion dollars for both of those incidents.

I remember very clearly all the things the Shuttle was going to do for space exploration especially the much lower cost because it's reusable. Right. It's a marvel of engineering but it was so far over budget even I can't exaggerate it. I hate to say it because NASA is well, NASA we all love it and what they stand for but in reality it's just another wildly overblown wasteful government program. The stories about costs are legendary, I've read about them for years. The line from the movie Contact that goes something like "the thing about government programs is why have only one when you can build two at four times the cost" pretty much says it all. That Russion system is simple, reliable, safe, powerful and cheap. Relatively speaking of course. Sure, when you're in a Communist dictatorship that has morphed into a Russian Mafia/KGB faux democracy where if you screw up your dog can't find you, it's somewhat easier to get things done.

Like Heinlein said, we'll just keep muddlin through and it usually works out.

At four times the cost.

Bob

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