Bruce Moomaw beat me to the punch in the comments -- I was already planning to recommend his lengthy and impressive account of the questions raised by the effort to make a roadmap for Mars explorations, which I was digesting over the weekend. Full version here: Bruce's précis, lovingly hand crafted to meet the needs of this blog's readers, is in the comments here. The only thing I'll add to the discussion for the time being is that I'm now sure the MSL delay to 2011 is real, but that as yet I'm not quite sure that the doubling up will happen, in that it might be announced but the second one might slip even further.
Meanwhile, over at Jeff Foust's Space Review the excellent Dwayne Day has written up the damning ESA report on Beagle (pdf here). The full version was released, thanks to New Scientist's moves under the new UK Freedom of Information Act, when I was in logic-board hell. I kept meaning to write about it after the fact, but now I don't think I'll bother, as Dwayne seems to me to have the matter pretty much bang to rights. Dwayne's insights are particularly worthy of our attention since he worked on the CAIB report after the loss of Columbia, and thus knows about this stuff. A second part of his thoughts on the subject are promised, but as yet has not appeared...[Update March 29th: the second part's now posted here]
And while we're at it, Jeff's account of what Mike Griffin, NASA's new administrator, feels about the space exploration initiative (oh, sorry, the new vision), the shuttle, and so on is also well worth a read.
So this post should in fact be called "Bruce on the future; Dwayne on the past; Jeff on the man of the moment". But that's too long.
[Author's note: I did not pay Oliver to call me "excellent."]
I have not yet written up part 2 on the Beagle report, but a new article in this week's Aviation Week concerning ESA's Mars plans is prompting me to do so (and providing a convenient hook for the story).
Unfortunately, my boss wants me to actually work for my salary, my girlfriend doesn't like it when I ignore her to spend the entire weekend in the office writing stuff that is read by literally dozens of people worldwide, the dog expects to be walked, etc. So I don't know if I'm going to get to it this weekend or next.
Posted by: Dwayne A. Day | March 16, 2005 at 03:35 PM
Doubtless to his girlfriend's displeasure Dwayne has now delivered the second part of his piece: link in the text above.
Posted by: Oliver Morton | March 29, 2005 at 06:47 PM
Esa have announced some sort of progress towards a rover type mars lander mission, landing in 2013. http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOBUV797E_index_0.html
It's not very clear to me what this means exactly as it seems to be only a recommendation.
Anyone have any more info?
Posted by: helvick | April 08, 2005 at 06:11 PM