The Phoenix Has Landed, or Hope Icy.
 

Not bad for a spacecraft made from spare parts :)

Interesting but I don't think it is worth the costs.

The High Frontier is an expensive one to get to, but Earth is too small and fragile a basket to carry all our eggs in.

H2O in any state means it's practical to live there.

Will be interesting to see whether its H2O like yours, or has other stuff in it.

I mean, we are gonna fuck this one up soon enough, we better start looking for the next one.

Oh rest assured, almost all our H20 has plenty of other stuff in it these days. :)

Disagree, maybe possible, but not practical. Practical, would be taking better care of this planet.

I agree. The costs we are sinking into things like the space station are staggering.

Apples and oranges... the costs of sending people into space (let alone keeping them there for long periods of time) are astronomical (sorry) compared to those for planetary probes. Consider that the cost of the Phoenix mission is comparable to that of ONE space shuttle launch ("comparable" as in ~$530 million vs. ~$450 million--and that $450 million doesn't, of course, include the cost of the vehicle itself, $1.7 billion in the case of Endeavour.).

IMO the money we're spending on unmanned planetary probes is a defensible expenditure in terms of the science we get back from it. But if you want to argue against it, that's a completely different animal than the space station.

Photo of Phoenix landing:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001464/

These exploratory spacecraft are inexpensive. Only 10% of the NASA budget is spent on what does all the science - unmanned spacecraft. The 90% spent on manned programs has yet to be doing any useful science. $80billion on a space station that was only supposed to cost $8billion - and it still has never done any useful science.

Many of the research from Venus and Mars have resulted in insights into how our own world works and how we can screw it up. If concerned for protecting this planet, then unmanned missions to other solar system bodies are essential research.

And the Hope Icy gets stronger: the pictures show polygonal terrain. Permafrost, baby!

I heard that there are radio transmission problems with the Phoenix, lending additional credence to my theory that the Martians do not want us poking about on their planet while immeasurably superior minds regard Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and deliberately, they draw their plans against us.

Come on, think about it ... how many of the recent missions to Mars got screwed up because of technical problems, entire vehicles getting lost, etc.

I'm not the only one who sees it this way.

Vast, cool, and unsympathetic, hey? Or only half-vast? :cool:

But seriously, last I heard they got the glitches sorted.

"It's -- no -- fun, bein' an illegal :alien: " [/80's music]

So now to further our research NASA has promised to pay the Russians 19 million dollars to install a second toilet on the space station next year. And we are about to lauch a space shuttle to take a frigging pump part to the space station to fix the existing toilet...

Now what was that you all were saying about how important it is to have the space station and how it was small change??

19 Million is small change for the government.

The space shuttle was going to be launched anyway. There's no special launch for the pump.