Hello Mark -

(still waiting for any good news on the Mars radiation problem, btw)

The thing that strikes me most are the parallels between some of the Mars "enthusiasts" and the UFO "enthusiasts". In the UFO case, it's "Of course the government knows all about UFOs, they're just keeping it all hidden." In the Mars case, it's "Of course we could go to Mars, if NASA just wanted to."

Why didn't the Mars Conference invite Goldin or the Advanced Programs engineers to their Conference to tell them about the real steps they tried to take towards a manned Mars mission? Same reason Gary persistently denies that Goldin worked on manned Mars missions as a young engineer.

If I were Goldin, I'd simply show up on the Mars Society's doorstep, in other words at this Conference, and set them straight, maybe bringing the AP people along, but certainly their slide shows.
This would be the best PR move he could make at this time.

I find myself in an awkward position here, as the architecture for both the shuttle and the station are not the ones I would have chosen. But if some space "enthusiasts" had of managed to convince Congress to shut down ISS, then the Congress would have shut down the Shuttle as well, and manned spaceflight would have come to an end.

Remember, I need NASA in one piece to set up an observatory on the Moon to deal with the impact hazard. I know this sounds delusional to some, but that's okay, as this problem is going to take a very serious step up in about 3 weeks.

The same situation holds for ISS science. No offense to the good people of Alabama, but US industries and engineering schools are largely elsewhere, and the ISS science should have been run out of either Ames, Glenn, or a new NASA center in Boston based out of MIT, with smaller offices in each of the major industrial areas.

I also believe that the ISS operations and the science experiments can be automated to a greater degree, freeing up astronaut time.

Mars enthusiasts generally ignore the fact that the same technologies that are needed now for ISS will be needed in the future for manned Mars flight - and it's much safer to try them out in low earth orbit.

Right now, the disk drives on the ISS computers are on the blink, but replacements are on the way. If this were a manned Mars flight, the crew would be cooked.

EP