Armstrong never took a photograph of the first footprint on the Moon. The photo many believe to be that <a href="http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/as11-40-5877.jpg">first footprint</a> actually belongs to <a href="http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/images11.html">Buzz Aldrin</a> (scroll down to 110:25:09).

I think Nasa has lost it's courage because they are afraid to take chances anymore. All that counts is the all mighty dollar and that is not how it suppose to be. We are suppose to the world leaders in space travel and were not.

The discovery of unmistakable signs of past or present Martian life would definitely be an unprecedented discovery, perhaps only second to one day finding intelligent life around other stars!  If it was found that Martian life began before it did here, than it might mean that life here actually came from Mars aboard pieces of debris blasted from Mars’s surface by large asteroids: a hypothesis called “transpirmia.”  Although it takes tens of millions of years for such pieces of debris to make the journey from one planet to the next, it has long been proven that microbes are able to survive such lengths of time by turning themselves into a spore (a seed-like state). Microbes found in salt mines have been revived from such a state after 250 million years of dormancy!

The only thing I’m not sure about is how much - if any - affect such a discovery would have on our civilization.  It's long been thought that the discovery of life beyond Earth would “unify the peoples of Earth.”  Although this may have been true at one time, I certainly don’t see the world as being ready for “unity” anytime soon nor the public interested in anything much more than reality TV.  War seems to be rampant these days and – unfortunately – the only thing likely to have a "unifying effect" might be a horrific outbreak of the bird flue or the catastrophic effects of global warming.  Can we meet those challenges while we are so busy fighting among ourselves I ask?  

I believe that we will return to the Moon, but I also think that NASA must try and tap the personnel resources that got us there in the first place. We only hear the government promoting science and mathmatics for our future space exploration. The pioneers of Apollo are our best resources for inspiration. I'm not talking about the astronauts themselves, but the folks behind the scenes that got them there to begin with. People like Henry Pohl and Aaron Cohen. These are our most valuable resources that are slowly disappearing one by one. How many people today have a working knowledge of the F-1 engine? I would imagine, very few.  

After looking at The Apollo 12 and 17 panoramas it is interesting to note that in 12 where the huge lander is that there isn’t even one speck of the loose dust blasted away under where the exhaust is. Of course their boots compress the powder-like fake soil like mad. That must be a ultra-lunar mystery, huh?

And, after panoramming around in the farcical 17 mission it is interesting to note that there is a single trail of fresh boot prints going through the ultra-fine dust out to where the astronaut is walking, but there are no tire prints at all for the rover to get out there. And, then of course is the farcical situation of where are the prints for the guy holding the camera? Hmmmm, that’s some truly thick slop going on here.

But, since the rover is a pasted-on picture anyway, that solves half of the farcical slop anyway.

All of the legs of the lander have gold foil on them all the way up in the 11 panorama also, so that conflicts with the view just outside the command module where only one leg had foil. But, with the CIA thinking they are addressing a bunch of idiots who wouldn’t know anything about space at all they just spun their slop and everybody ate it up like it was Wheaties, and who in their right mind would doubt that. My gosh, hook, line, sinker and the boat the sucker’s sittin’ in.

CONGRATULATIONS on the Space Journalism Award Alan. It is a much deserved recognition of your extreme effort to keep the rest of us abreast of the grand adventure of our time! The SFF 2006 New Space is just the latest venue that will plant the seed corn of the future. Please take time to encourage the Gen Y'ers attending the conference to carry the flame of hope and innovation forward!

The likelihood of finding "unmistakable signs of life, past or present" is indeed slim.  More likely, given history and the skeptisim inherent in good science is that there might be some evidence (e.g. those mysterious screw holes in those martian meteorites) that some will postulate as signs of life.  Others will offer competeing interpretations of inorganic origin.  There will be much debate, more reasearch, and eventually a concences reached decades later in the field of astrobiology.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the impact of such a discovery if and when it happens, should it register at all, will be one of A) vast indifference - what has that got to do with my life, the price of gas, the current war, etc.  B) vast dissapointment -- those fosilized microbes are nothing like Mr. Spock, E.T., or whatever the current fav pop sci-fi alien is, so who cares? or C) quiet satisfaction from the fringe space fans who, after all knew all along that there was, and just HAD to be life out there.  But profound impact?  The world stopping to wonder at it all?  People undergoing deep and permanent spiritual awakinings and rethinking of long-held religious beliefs?  Over some scratchings in some martian rock that we spent trillions of tax dollars to discover?  What planet are YOU from?

Ah, such cynicism!  Sadly, I have to think that Scott of Ohio is correct.  The marching superstitious morons are beginning to cause me to become cynical.

Let's not forget that although we planted a chem lab on Mars, we put boots on the ground on the Moon.  Viking was very good, mind, but it does not compare to having people there!

A great link to the delta winged dinosaur!  The preferred layout is nearly identical to a plan view of the SAAB Viggen!  The combination of a delta wing and a canard fore-plane gives superb low-speed control, but allows very high sppeds as well.  I strongly suspect that the critter was not supersonic, sadly!

Check out the New Scientist.  Relic neutrinos (?) may upset the dark energy theory.  This just keeps getting better and better!  Just to keep stirring the pot, seems there might be a bit of variation in type 1A supernovae, too!  The "standard candle" ain't so standard, after all!  Welcome to the Murphy Mental Flexibility Program!

The ice caves of Titan!  Sounds like an Asimov story.

A little decent in the dark energy circles, eh?  Just let me know when I officially get the chance to say "I told you so!"  Cosmology is a great inspiration but there just seems to be dramatic changes in the air - you know, things have just been too certain for too long and change is probably the most universal constant of them all.  Cosmologists have too easilly "gloss over" observations that run counter to their predictions.  I SECRETLY wonder about possible other explenations for a red shift, though I'm not holding my breath on that one...  

I also agree with scott on his A-C bullet points regarding the likely non-effect of discovering microbes on Mars.  I love the "vast indiference" one!

The SAAB Griffon (like the Viggen before it) is the best jet in the world: The Eurofighter being a close second.

I was in high school when Armstrong landed on the moon.  And yes, he DID land there, despite what some fools still want to believe.  With a good telescope you could see light reflecting off the Apollo capsule in orbit around the moon as Armstrong and Aldrin were walking around. I saw it, and first hand, not on TV, so tell me how the CIA faked that!!

Anyway, if someone would have told me then that 37 years later we would be using a not-very-well designed piece of '70's technology to get to not-very-useful low orbit, I would have laughed at them.  But that is the reality.  The shuttle is a huge pile of engineering compromises, mostly due to budget, not engineering, reasons.  Congress decided in the '70's that buying votes with social programs was more important than Buck Rogers, so NASA's budget was butchered.  It was supposeed to be retired in the mid-'90's, but thanks to Clinton and Congress nothing to replace was designed and it still isn't built.
 Do you know the real reason why Columbia blew up?  When the shuttle was originally designed there were no joints in the solid fuel boosters; they were one piece like the Minutemen or Poseidon missiles.  The plan was to make them in California, then ship them by boat through the Panama Canal to Florida.  Congress cut that out of the budget, so NASA had to put in the joints to make the pieces small enough to ship by land!  Did you ever wonder why Congress let the folks at NASA and Morton Thiokol off the hook so easily?  Now you know.  

For those of you that question why go at all, consider this:  we are using up this planet.  We still have a long way to go, and most of us will be gone before it's a real problem, but it will happen.  There are gazillions of tons of resources over our heads right now, enough to give everyone on the planet a lifestyle better than anyone has now.  All we have to do is figure out how to get that stuff here.  
 This isn't science for the most part, it's engineering.  The main problem is that real-world engineering on this scale is a matter of small steps.  No one was building Pentium computers in 1990, or 747's in 1920.  You do something, sometimes it works, sometimes it breaks.  Then you figure out why it broke, fix it and go on.  We haven't done this at NASA for a long time.  The hotshot engineers of the '60's are now bureaucrats pushing retirement.  No guts, no glory, but no pink slip and a secure pension.

This is why we need things like the space station.  It's too low for many things, but it's the best we have for now.  Simulating things on computers are great for finding most problems, but at some point you have to try things out to see if they actually work.  There are ideas for deep space propulsion, like solar sails or ion drives, for example.  We know that they will work; for example satellites sent to Venus were steered by tilting the solar cell panels.  But what are the problems in deploying the sail?  Unless there are people in orbit that can stay in orbit long enough to try not one but dozens of experiments we will not make these things practical.  
 Why go at all?  Consider this: one of the decent-sized asteroids contains more iron than the whole Iron Range in Minnesota, and it's already a metal, not oxides like here on Earth.  That's enough metal to build a space station for everyone on Earth.  An estimate done in the '90's figured, based on commodity prices then, that there was enough mineral wealth in the Asteroid Belt to give every human $500 trillion (that's $500,000,000,000,000.00).  Yet here we sit.  Makes me want to cry, or maybe shoot some politicians.  I won't, none of the creeps are worth going to jail for.  But that is the legacy of guys like William Proxmire.
 So do something for engineering today.  Call your congresscreature, talk to a teenager about why it's fun to do this stuff.  Make some noise!

To address some of the issues in this thresd:

NASA can only work with the budget it's given. Tis is why the shuttleis the design it is. Cheaper to develop, but more expensive to fly. The agency originally wanted a teo stage, fully reusaeble system with flyback booster. More expensive to do, but less expensive to fly. Failure to get that design approved was a function of Congressional unwillingness to spend more, debate over how much the system would be used and a fear by critics that it would be too much of a foot in the door to a Manned Mars Program.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/contents.htm

On theother hand, some people in NASA (and let it be noted that many of the Apollo engineers have retired ot died by now) have always hoped for another 'pull out all the stops' Apollo-type project, and that's not coming, either. The future belongs to commercial space (except on the edges of exploration and R&D, exactly where government *should* be), and the agency would do well to recognize that in the US, 'space' (including manned space) no longer necessairily means NASA.

Yes, it's probably true that finding evifence of life on Mars, Europa or anywhere else in this solar system, would likely get an initial burst of interest from many people, with general disinterest soon after. That doesn't make it any less a profound issue, and one worthy of exploring. What would we be, if all research was done purely on the grounds of public excitement?

Similarly, it's not safe to assume *any* space project will have any 'unifying' effect on humanity, and should never be sold on that basis.

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