Mars
: Our Spirit rover has landed on Mars and sent back a signal. It would be unseemly to gloat.
38 responses to “Mars”
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So cool!
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Frankly, gloating is too much fun. Finally, the Brits and Russians have something in common: neither does so well on the Red Planet.
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It would be unseemly to gloat in view of Pathfinder, too.
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I don’t want to gloat, I just want lots of Mars exploration. And a manned expedition.
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Gloating over Mars expeditions? Now, there’s a mature way to look at the world. It is actually sort of amusing to see that Mr. Jarvis, who breathlessly and constantly plugs the blogosphere and promising us it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,while reminding us all that he invented Entertainment Weekly and created the TV Guide crossword puzzle or WTF it is he claims, gets so relatively few commens to his little gloats, er posts. As I read at 2:00 am, his last three posts received respectively 4, 1 and 0 comments. I also read Calpundits blog on a regular basis, and he has 9, 24 and 84 to his last three posts. And those numbers are pretty much par for the course. Why so little interest in Jeff Jarvis’ posts? I figured this site would be a main stopping point for the rightwingers who tend to dominate the web.
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JBK, you’re up at 2am, counting comments at a web site, in order to make a partisan snark about a seeming lack of interest? Have you got a mirror?
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Aha!
But what do you think NASA will find on Mars ? Certainly not intelligent life! -
I agree, gloating is a negative term associated with “us vs. them”. Be proud. But also remember much of the rest of the world does not give a crap about what we accomplished. Don’t look for any Iraqis to congratulate a GI on this. Hell, the average American does not care that much.
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Well lk, I’d like it pointed out when the UK has gloated over the US space programme? The US Space programme is constantly praised in the UK (in excellently produced BBC series as well as the news). As a nation I don’t think we have gloated over the loss of two space shuttles due to mismanagement and poor safety culture, but rather felt the same pain and grief about those losses.
That is why I am so disappointed in Jeff’s pissy comments about the failure of Beagle. His implication that the death of Beagle makes the NASA expedition so much more enjoyable is of the same flavour as the French hoping the US will fail in Iraq as it will validate their pre-war position! Get a grip Jeff.
For the record I am not an anti-american. -
Duh, us “rightwingers” are too busy eating puppies and plotting invasions of middle eastern countries (or maybe Venezuela) to comment much on websites run by slightly left of center but sane and non-pissy people like Mr. Jarvis.
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Anyway, I don’t think Jeff was actually gloating. He was joking.
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slightly left of center but sane and non-pissy people like Mr. Jarvis
Jarvis is leftish? In what universe? -
Good morning, everybody. What time is it? Time to lighten up!
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Just a few hours after landing, Spirit sent back its first images from Mars’ Gusev crater.
Absolutely awesome!
I’m gloating big time. -
Being half-Yank, half-Brit (Scottish father), I’m staying out of this one.
I’m quite saddened by the loss of the Beagle. Not just because Britain was robbed of a historically nice moment, but because I found its low-cost schtick rather interesting.
The cheaper space travel becomes the sooner we can all get off this damn rock. -
Is there any way we can have Spirit locate the Beagle? I know it stopped sending signals but maybe it’s just lodged somewhere and can’t move about. I’m not gloating at all. I think space and science technology should be shared. The more minds working on it the better for mankind.
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Absolutely awesome!
Agreed.
I’m gloating big time.
Why can’t you just be justifiably proud?
To Gloat: To feel or express great, often malicious, pleasure or self-satisfaction.
Nice to know that our allies, after spending billions on their project, get to gloat over a small group of people who did it on a shoe string and should be congratulated on getting anything on it’s way to Mars. -
Wow, much has advanced since the days when my father,one of the original engineers at NASA, designed the rocket platforms used at Cape Canaveral to propel man to the moon.
His spirit is soaring with each advance NASA has made since then.
From the days at Cape Canaveral to now, every person who has contributed in their own way to the process is a hero. I am excited for the future of our space exploration in the 21st century. -
Hmmm… well, having grown up in Scotland with an American accent (my nickname at school was “Yank”), I got a fair share of anti-Americanism directed my way. Heh. The funny thing is how non-Americans are always so offended if Americans start returning the compliment.
“You mean we can’t have any of ze money for le rebuilding of L’Iraq? Sacrebleu!!”
As I get more and more into this I.T. thing, I’m starting to see more and more how closely tied one’s standard of living is tied into good access to information. Basically, the Romans could subjegate the Gauls simply because they knew more.
Right now I’m seeing the gap between American and European access to information widen faster than ever, particularly on the internet (How many of your fave alpha sites- Google etc- are not American? Be honest).
For this reason I expect anti-Americanism to increase, not decrease, as Europe continues to lose the information war. -
JBK’s remark is just about as surreal and gratuitous as imaginable. Where the hell did THAT come from?
Anyway, I sort of understand where Anthony’s coming from – the loss of the Beagle, especially for British/European space junkies, had to hurt a lot. I think Jeff was just trying to be silly – the same thought occurred to me (to compare one Mars lander with the other), and as a blogger with the compulsion to, you know, WRITE ABOUT THINGS, I’m sure that’s the angle which immediately occurred to him. I can tell you that from the American side it just seems good-natured and innocuous, not a real issue of gloating and lording it over others. But I do understand how much it sucks for those in Europe excited about space exploration for the Beagle to fail.
Eh, we’ve wasted way too much time on this anyway. Hey! 20 comments between late Saturday night and early Sunday morning! Does that qualify us for the big leagues, JBK? -
If anyone wants to gloat, gloat for another human victory against a large and challenging universe. Legitimate advances are always more satisfying than “advances” that are only attempts to clean up our own mess.
In any case, I stayed up w-a-y beyond my East Coast bedtime waiting for the first images to come in. Great stuff. Now that we’ve put a golf cart on Mars, let’s get some golfers there, too. -
Oh my.
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By the way, Jeff — this is why I warned you against a forum.
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Hugh says: ‘For this reason I expect anti-Americanism to increase, not decrease, as Europe continues to lose the information war.’
Excellent point. Remember, though, that there are virtually *no* barriers to entry to information innovation.
Join in. Europeans can carp and pout if they want, but where’s the joy in that? Innovate and have fun (and have success, which is fun too). -
There are a lot of psychological and cultural reasons why innovations happens at X but not Y, though.
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But the Beagle2 did have a call-sign that was evocative of the Close Encounters call-sign.
And some additional “spacey” music. Maybe sales of that album were supposed to help subsidize the rover. -
There is an information “war”? Since there is a real “war” going on now, perhaps the hyperbole should be ratcheted down. The information “race”?
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‘For this reason I expect anti-Americanism to increase, not decrease, as Europe continues to lose the information war.’
In what way was I anti-American?
Let’s turn this around and imagine that this has worked out differently?
If I had posted:
Our Beagle has landed on Mars and sent back a signal. It would be unseemly to gloat over the NASA failure.
I’d be ashamed. Both missions have important scientific experiments on for the benefit of humanity as a whole. -
It is thrilling that the Spirit has landed successfully. It is a shame that the Beagle 2 didn’t. The reaction on the Beagle website was gracious and positive. They get it. It should not be about who got there first or whose worked and whose didn’t. “Earthlings” have a working presence on another planet – it is all good.
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I’ve been at the Planetary Society’s Wild About Mars events in downtown Pasadena (about the best place someone unconnected with the mission could be) and blogging it. Bless the hearts of those who made wi-fi available yesterday during the landing; hope it happens again today.
Yesterday’s and today’s coverage -
Prof.,
The best mission to Mars was the Mars Pathfinder (July 4, 1997, 10:07 PST). The cheapest technology used. NASA had this project as a garage project – by that it meant that it did not have the agency wide focus.
The current mission builds on that success. But, this time around it was an agency-wide effort.
I am elated but I wanted to just comment on Pathfinder. Just a day before Christmas, when the Beagle2 was going to be landing, a reporter from BBC was on NPR (forgot what show). They talked about all missions but not Pathfinder. The reporter concluded that Beagle2 was unique because of its size, cost, etc. I said to myself: You forgot the Pathfinder!
AKB -
Spot on Mara, as the NASA website says about one of their excellent images from their rover:
This image, taken by the Navigation Camera onboard Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, shows the surface of Mars near the rover. The yellow boxes represent the outlines of the image frames that will be acquired when European Space Agency’s Mars Express rover passes overhead. Labeled dots represents surface features that scientists plan to investigate.
So NASA “gets it”. I bet they arn’t gloating. -
I didn’t say anybody here was being anti-american. i was just talking about it generally.
“information war” or “information race”. take your pick; either one works for me. -
Whenever called for his pettiness, Jeff’s favorite line of defense is that everyone else should just lighten up.
I myself and elated over our success and disappointed in the apparent British failure. The Brits showed remarkable ingenuity and a sense of heroism and adventure in their low budget approach. Between the loss of scientific information, and an almost inevitable view of the Beagle 2 as failure, it just became harder to try new innovative approaches to getting to Mars. Truly a sad day for us all. -
“Whenever called for his pettiness, Jeff’s favorite line of defense is that everyone else should just lighten up.”
Not everyone. Just a few of you. -
I think our best friends the Brits tried to pull off the Mars robot which sounded too good to be true. How much did they say they spent, $20 million or something. Now how in the world could a robot that’s cheaper than the average US fighter jet succeed in covering a zillion miles of open space, THEN landing successfully onto the Red Planet, THEN doing some sort of exploration and transmitting some kind of information back to us.
All the talk about ‘bad location’ or ‘some crater’ that the Beagle2 is stuck in seems like some baseless speculation to me. Those UK scientists have to get real and admit their drone either burned down in the Martian atmosphere or crashed into pieces at the contact with Mars. Beagle2 was just too tiny, sleek and dare I say it European. NASA’s Spirit seems to me tough like a rock, a real American built killer machine.
Gloating in Chicago,
naz
j/k -
J/K,
While I am no fan of Brits or BBC (notwithstanding their presence in Iraq), I have to mention that Pathfinder cost less than Beagle2 :)
But, we planned (Dec. 96) and then made it (July 4, 97). The technology used for Pathfinder was late 1980s/early 1990s. Cheapest, lightest, fastest. That was the motto.
Today the Spirit is successful but a lot of this success is BUILT upon pathfinder.
PS: Full disclosure, I LOVED the Pathfinder experience. I cried with joy and dance like a madman on July 4, 1997. I never done that for any celebration on the 4th, but that was just a great day.
AKB -
Your Spirit rover that landed on Mars is no longer sending back a signal. It would be unseemly to gloat.
