All in all a productive trip to So. Cal.
We got to see the two Mars landers under construciton, along with their space ships.
Building spacecraft is definately not high volume work.
We watched a guy, who we were told is a Masters in EE, hand stringing a cable set strand by strand.
The custom work tables are impressive as hell.
The ships look like pony sized apollo command capsules.
How they are fitting a rover and its beach balls into that tiny space is mind boggling.
The new video describing the '03 mission is really really great.
The deep space network control room is pretty generic loiking, except that the Cal Tech undergrads babysitting it looked pretty pleased to be there.
The life size Voyager and Galileo craft are bigger than I realized. Chuck Berry sounds great.
By coincidence Farmer was the key-note speaker at breakfast the next day.
He pretty much gave Nick's talk about Mars, but substituted H2O for CO2 throughout the his talk.
I was able to get one of his colleagues to talk a bit about a big paper coming out very soon that supposedly demonstrates the wet Mars pov convincingly, but when pressed for details, she said if she told me she would have to kill me.
Cal Tech is totally cool. A tiny MIT with much better landscaping and weather.
Ed