APOD: Phobos South Pole from Mars Express (2011 Jan 24)

[Case]

Or M100 before and after
before | after

It's worth noting that these M100 images show just the central bright part of the galaxy, not the whole galaxy with arms and everything.

[Chris Peterson]

It only blows the human space flight argument away if you agree with Chris that science is the primary criteria. Robots should be in space in a big way, now and forever more, doing things that (only at first) don't make economic sense. Suggesting otherwise is short term thinking and long term folly. Suggesting otherwise is like suggesting several decades years ago that we shouldn't bother with Voyager spacecraft that don't really accomplish anything important such as having men plant flags on other planets.

I definitely think science should be the primary criteria. I don't think it should be the only one. And I don't think every mission has to be "economic" in some simplistic sense. There is such a thing as an investment in technology- very little that is of value was immediately so. But I do think that if we're going to put people in space, it needs to be for a good reason- either clearly scientific, clearly commercial, or clearly something with the potential to become valuable. I don't class "the next frontier" or anything like that in such a category.

[JohnD]

Chris is capable of making his own points, but I didn't mean, and I don't think he did, that Hubble and its kind were not worth their cost. I took him to mean that it would cost less to have put up another Hubble rather than spend as much as it did to repair the first.

John

[user885]

Why no speed up the decent of Phobos , let it slam in to the surface, the resulting dust, possible melt, could kick start the terraforming effort?

without a magnetic field, terraforming would't stand a chance.

[BMAONE23]

Or M100 before and after
before | after

It's worth noting that these M100 images show just the central bright part of the galaxy, not the whole galaxy with arms and everything.

Click to view full size image

from WIKI
This image shows much of the spiral structure beyond the central region and is also an upgraded Hubble image mosaic
The WIKI link has several more

[Flase]

Sorry, hip shooting at costs. NASA estimate $1.5 TRILLION per Shuttle launch over the life of the programme, but $500 MILLION at the end when all the non-recurring costs are paid.

Sounds like a rip off. Somebody's skimming some money along the way. If it were worth sending something up to the Phobos Grunt probe, there will be another window for embarking to Mars.

Anyway, the makers of Avatar spent $500 million making CGI aliens that look exactly like actors painted blue, aliens with human mammary glands and everything, when they could have saved themselves half a billion bucks and just painted the actors blue. It worked for them. Even the alien animals looked like rhinoceroses with a hammer-head prosthesis stuck on their horns.