Spirit Lives On

For all the people who criticize NASA and its recent struggles to maintain and achieve a vision without going drastically over budget, you simply have to applaud those folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who conceived and managed the Mars Rover program. The Spirit rover passed an incredible milestone yesterday, completing its 2000th day working on the surface of Mars. Spirit, and its companion rover Opportunity, continue to study the surface and composition of the Mars planet years longer than they were ever envisioned to survive. Granted, they have their challenges (Spirit's stuck in a sand trap), but that does nothing to diminish the incredible record of achievement that continues to this day, 5.5 years after their arrival on the Red Planet. Enthusiasts can keep track of progress here; they even have a Twitter-feed (I don't do Twitter, but I'm likely in the minority).

In other news, the President's Augustine Panel is coming to conclusion. This update from Rand Simberg highlights some of the possible conclusions that may find their way into the final report.

The good news is that for the first time a major panel of this sort has explicitly stated that the goal of having a human spaceflight program has to be for the ultimate settlement of space, and if we aren’t aiming toward that, there’s not much point. Also, for fans of sending humans to Mars, all of the options are designed with that end in mind, though probably not fast enough for them. The other good news is that the panel seems to strongly support commercial space and believes that the new policy should be much more supportive of it than NASA’s current plans. But for advocates of anything resembling the current four-year-old plan to do "Apollo on Steroids," with new launch and crew delivery systems dubbed “Constellation,” none of the options will be pretty.

Apparently the panel is supportive of the partial commercialization of launch services, which I believe holds the greatest promise of moving history beyond the confines of near-earth orbit. Unfortunately, NASA employment issues will continue to cloud the future of the space program, at least politically. But again, a rightly constructed partnership between NASA and space entrepreneurs may just be the ticket to realizing those dreams that brought people to NASA in the first place.

For now, Spirit and Opportunity live on. May that be true in more ways than one.