In their zeal to fly space missions under the banner of “faster, better, cheaper,” NASA managers are forgetting one thing. Those missions also have to succeed.
March 13th, 2000
NASA Report: Too Many Failures with Faster, Better, Cheaper
A former NASA manager issued a critical report Monday of the agency’s “faster, better, cheaper” approach that has pushed the agency’s engineers and scientists to crank out more frequent, low-cost and stripped-down missions since the early 1990s.
March 13th, 2000
Saturn 5 Blueprints Safely in Storage
A NASA official has denied a claim made by a book author that blueprints for the mighty Saturn 5 rocket used to push Apollo astronauts to the moon were lost.
March 13th, 2000
‘Meet Me In the Airlock … ‘ Will Sex In Space Fly?
It may not be such a leap to assume that when locked away in cramped spaceships on years-long missions to Mars and other planets, astronauts might end up playing a little bit more intensely than NASA-TV would care to show. But as a piloted mission to Mars moves closer to the realm of possibility, scientists are beginning to expand their studies into sex and romance in space.
March 11th, 2000
Mars to NASA: Send Rovers Right Over
Whatever the outcome of NASA’s current restructuring of future Mars missions, rovers — ambulatory robots that are equal parts geologist and public relations envoy — will in all likelihood continue to play as high a profile role in exploration as the plucky, six-wheeled Sojourner did in 1997
March 10th, 2000
Study Reveals Martian Subsurface Secrets
Armed with a combination of detailed maps of Mars’ gravity patterns and high-resolution topography maps of the planet’s surface, a team of scientists has calculated the rough shape and thickness of the martian crust.
March 10th, 2000
NASA Draws Up Big Booster for Mars
The first step in any human expedition to Mars won
March 10th, 2000
Mars My Destination: The Golden Age of Red Planet Film
With talk of real Mars missions in the early decades of the new century, cinematic trips to the Red Planet have once again become fashionable. Once again, accuracy has taken a back seat to storytelling. But maybe this new crop of Mars movies will help spur audiences to demand the real thing. And then today’s 5-year-olds won’t have to be satisfied with watching science fiction voyages.
March 8th, 2000
NASA at the Martian Crossroads
Stung by the recent back-to-back losses of two robotic spacecraft at Mars, NASA has embarked on an exhaustive retooling of its entire program to explore the Red Planet. Some missions may be delayed, swapped, beefed up or stripped down. Others may be cancelled outright. But the aim, said Jordan, the Program architect for the Space and Earth Sciences Directorate at NASA
March 8th, 2000
Polar Opposites: Icy Shapes on Mars Reveal Two Climates
We know Mars is not made of cheese, but Cornell researcher Peter Thomas points out that some telling new features on the red planet look a lot like the Swiss variety. More importantly, the landforms hold clues to how permafrost develops at the poles and shapes the look of the land.