I’m watching the egress of Opportunity live on NASA TV right now. Very exciting. I wish there was more live video.

It’s about 0127 PST, and I'm watching the NASA channel live showing us the MER mission control room as the first batch of images comes in from Opportunity, the second of two amazing Mars rovers.
The terrain surrounding Opportunity in Meridiani Planum, is so amazing looking. Unlike the rocky surface we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on all the Mars images we typically see, Meridiani is very smooth. But, there are these amazing outcroppings of rock structures in view that are very exciting to the scientists, and to me!
I really wish JPL would give us an audio track that’s just the comm chatter, without the commentators. They’re trying to explain things, but I’d really rather just listen to the scientists and engineers.
Spirit, after getting a little sick, seems to be doing much better. Once again, congratulations to the JPL team. You’ve done amazing work, and have made me very proud.
Check out the mission at the MER Mission Home Page. They’ve gotten over four billion hits in the last 24 days. That’s about 1929 hits per second!

As I feared, Bush Jr. announced a new plan for space exploration, containing a terribly misguided “extended human presence on the moon”. I’ve come to recognize this as typical of politicians in general and of Bush in particular.
I fully applaud refocussing NASA and the space program to support sending humans to Mars. However, the science and engineering goals and constraints are best served by Dr. Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct approach.
I’m not going to try to argue the merits of manned exploration to Mars. That’s a huge subject all by itself. Thankfully, this administration and most of Washington seems to accept the need.
Typical Mars mission plans (including Bush’s) call for the assembly of large spacecraft in orbit (or on the moon), a process which requires multiple launches of heavy lift vehicles. These have been deemed so expensive as to relegate such programs to future generations.¹
Commentary I heard on NPR today suggests that we can expect the return to the moon by 2020 and humans on Mars by mid-century, at a cost of $1 trillion. Personally, I plan to see humans land on Mars. In 2050, I’ll turn 81. It’s likely I’ll be alive, but I’d sure hate to miss it because of senility or death.
Dr. Zubrin and others have for years espoused a plan that can get humans to Mars in ten years, for a fraction of the cost, by skipping the moon. There’s no scientific reason to go to the moon, and no good plan for Mars requires mining the moon or using it as a shipyard.
I’ll try to post more information on this subject soon. In the meantime, check out these links:

• NASA’s Mars Direct Page
• Mars Direct Home Page
• International Conference for the Exploration and Colonization of Mars
• NASA Ames Center for Mars Exploration

And I encourage you to read Dr. Zubrin’s book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet.
¹Zubrin, Robert M., Practical Methods for Near-Term Piloted Mars Missions.

Congratulations to the Mars Exploration Rover team at JPL for their successful Mars landing, 20:35 on 1/3/2004. By all accounts, everything is going better than expected.
I envy you guys and wish you all the best in the coming weeks.

Because of strong DVD sales and syndication popularity, the awesome show Family Guy might find its way back to Fox. Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group apparently called the series a late-blooming phenomenon that may have been aired before its time (according to an article in USA Today).
Dumb bitch (asshole?). He/she has to spin it so they don’t look like dumb fucking pigs who can’t judge a show on its merits. Family Guy aired sporadically at best, and was hardly given a chance to shine.
The same is true of the greatest show ever, Firefly. Fox aired Firefly without consistency, for less than 13 episodes, and put it up against Major League Baseball. Firefly was a complex, intelligent show, and requires time in order to grow a following. With programming like that afforded to it, it’s no wonder that its ratings were less than stellar.
Networks (Fox in particular) it seems are moving ever more toward cheating the viewing public (or at least, toward cheating the intelligent viewing public). A season of a television show used to be a solid set of weekly episodes from some time in the Fall to some time in the Spring. Now, we’re lucky to get four consecutive weeks before a repeat is aired, and no network will give a ratings-challenged but excellent show more than a few episodes to climb the ratings ladder.
But ratings must be inaccurate. How else can you explain the dearth of excellence like Firefly and the nauseatingly abundant crap like Survivor, The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire? Are there really so many more dumb cows watching television than there are high school graduates? Is public education so bad in the U.S. that someone with no more than a high school diploma is enthralled with crappy reality TV and would rather experience other people’s (supposedly real) misery rather than be whisked away to lands unimagined? How pathetic are we?
I certainly never get polled. I’ve never been polled about any of the recent shows I’ve thought were excellent but got cancelled. So I&rsuqo;m forced to wonder: who makes the ratings? What sub human, trailer-home-dwelling piece of Bush-electing shit chose what shows I get to watch?
For the record: I would pay substantially ($30/mo) for a single channel that brought me the best (and even better-than average) that television had to offer: shows like Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Star Trek (all of them), X-Files, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Glory Days, Strange Luck, Alias, 24, The Dead Zone…the list of good programming really does go on and on! Is there a model where ratings isn’t the driving force behind what kind of programming is offered?