Mark

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• Commented on NASA iPad App Ignores Important Solar System Objects and Missions

  Interestingly, ISS ended up about where Ceres and Vesta should be. I wonder how it made it all the way out there?! We must have solved the propulsion problem....

• Commented on Bobby Braun's Plan To Re-charge NASA Technology

  Actually those are just some RFIs for some parts of his program. You can find his complete plans here (referenced in one of the RFIs)....

• Commented on Some People REALLY Want To Go Into Space

  Sometimes I shake my head at the titles Keith comes up with, but he sure nailed this one right on. These guys would have to be pretty desperate to ride in that thing!...

• Commented on Orion Starts Test Phase

  It's foolish to drag a re-entry capsule along on a deep space voyage unless you're planning on throwing away the rest of your spacecraft every mission (also foolish). That does not necessarily follow. There are architectures that bring the crew...

• Commented on Are you ready for the Red Planet? Book Review: Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars"

  There were many articles. Here is one: NASA: Mars rovers spared budget cuts Here is another on an obscure NASA blog that you might frequent: Give Us What We Want or We'll Shoot The Cute Little Rover...

• Commented on Are you ready for the Red Planet? Book Review: Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars"

  Also, if you have to abandon them due to budget short falls. You can just pull the plug with no public out cry. Actually, when they said they were going to pull the plug on Spirit, there was a public...

• Commented on Webb Troubles Continue

  Redundancy is not always the answer to improving reliability. Especially for complex mechanical deployments which often have many unavoidable single point failures where things can get stuck. The answer is a reliable design that pays excruciating attention to detail, tons...

• Commented on SpaceX Gives a Preview of Falcon X and XX

  So is it pronounced "Falcon Ecks" and "Falcon Ecks Ecks" or "Falcon Ten" and "Falcon Twenty"?...

• Commented on Getting Out of the Gravity Well on One Thin Dime

  Ok, so you're not complaining about the tech transfer, but rather NASA funding the research. But I'm still confused. You originally wrote: in fact when Diaz was an astronaut he was funded by NASA Johnson for VASIMR research in what...

• Commented on Getting Out of the Gravity Well on One Thin Dime

  webbja wrote: when Diaz was an astronaut he was funded by NASA Johnson for VASIMR research in what most consider to be an unfair business practice and the govt funded research was then transferred into a business. I know of...

• Commented on Kepler Team Needs To Take PR 101

  Keith wrote: There is no hesitation or equivocation, this is a declarative statement that comes across as a fact i.e. "the Galaxy *IS* rich in small, Earth-like planets". You certainly would need a lot of confirmed "candidates" in order to...

• Commented on Oops. Looks Like Elon Musk Isn't Broke After All ;-)

  Electric cars on Mars are the only kind we have....

• Commented on Falcon 9 Launch Totally Successful

  SpaceX has a truly outstanding team. That kind of success can't happen by accident....

• Commented on Presentations From The Closed Space Organization Meeting (Update)

  Ed still needs to fix that slide that shows GRAIL as an Earth Science mission....

• Commented on James Cameron's 3D Vision For Mars

  Well the MSSS website says it is an advantage since it reduces data volume for color pictures Not if you compare apples and apples. Obviously yes, reduced resolution images will take up less data volume. There are four subpixels ......

• Commented on James Cameron's 3D Vision For Mars

  The average color camera does not have to shift color filters over the entire CCD and take three pictures through red, green, and blue filters in order to generate a color picture. Indeed, the average camera mixes the color filters...

• Commented on James Cameron's 3D Vision For Mars

  They could approximate color by taking three pictures using a red, green, and blue color filter but they were black and white cameras. That is the way that all color cameras work. There are red, green, and blue filters somewhere...

• Commented on James Cameron's 3D Vision For Mars

  "Yes, if you mean black and white cameras but the Mastcams with zoom lenses (if they are finished in time) would be the first color cameras on Mars capable of 3D pictures/video." If you mean black and white?! Every single...

• Commented on Story Musgrave Thinks That The ISS is "an ungodly sin"

  I would only argue with Story's arithmetic. Voyager was about $0.9B in those year dollars. More like ~$2B in ISS-peak-year dollars. So you'd get about 50 Voyager-class missions for ISS, not 300. Lest someone think that since you got two...

• Commented on NASA Can't Seem To Find Its Documents

  It's happened to me ......

• Commented on NASA OIG: $368 Million Cost to Make Constellation Metric Compliant

  Even if Constellation (or whatever program follows) goes entirely metric, NASA's US contractors will still use English. There will still be conversions. Moving conversions from one place to another isn't very likely to improve risk, but it can cost money....

• Commented on Aaron Cohen

  That the Apollo program accomplished the impossible in such a short time has always had me wondering how the heck they pulled that off. Every once in a while when I have the good fortune to work with someone from...

• Commented on NASA Still Can't Get That Metric Stuff Right

  Keith wrote: So ... did someone in PAO translate from metric units back into English units? Wacky. I'm really missing something. Keith: you complain about NASA PAO a fair bit, but here they finally do something right by communicating with...

• Commented on And The Children Shall Lead

  Boy, I'm sure glad he didn't come talk at my graduation! How depressing. Almost all of the talk was about how everything is about as f-upped as it could be, and his uplifting message at the end is he asks...

• Commented on President Obama Live

  The moon landing was our greatest achievement? ISS is second? I think we all know that NASA's greatest mission has already been scientifically determined to be the Wallops Superpressure Ballon....

• Commented on "I wasn't born here at JSC, but I got here as soon as I could"

  It's the usual denial, then anger (current state), then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance, then rebuilding. Let's just give it time to run its course. These are all people who have invested much of their lives in something that appears...

• Commented on NASA Is Oblivious

  A minor point, but the highest grossing movie of all time is Gone With the Wind. Titanic is #6 and Avatar is currently #21. Not taking into account inflation is just plain silly....

• Commented on Tuesday Directorate Budget Conference

  You would only be able to tell if Bolden is a "yes man" if you were privy to their conversations. If you work for the President, once the conversations are over you're expected to do what he says....

• Commented on 2001's Newspad = 2010's iPad?

  How is the iPad or Newspad qualitatively different from these? It's very thin with a color display and is about the right size, so it is the first one that looks like the 2001 Newspad. The main difference is that...

• Commented on 2001's Newspad = 2010's iPad?

  We're halfway there! Now we just need to get an iPad on a manned nuclear-electric propulsion spacecraft on its way to another planet....