Speaking of commercial sopnsorships, have you guys heard that the next European Mars probe will have corporate sponsors? The Beagle 2 probe will be carried to Mars on the Mars Express orbiter, to be launched in 2003. They won’t announce the sponsors till the deals are sealed, but there are three “sizeable and international” companies. The news said that “the title sponsor will get its name associated with the project – ‘the XYZ Beagle 2 Mission to Mars’ in the same way that you say ‘the coca-Cola Cup’ in football.”
Did you bother reading my second post, Jinxs?
If we really cared about what “our astronauts and scientists deserve” we’d fund the space program much better than we do. Anything we send up won’t be any more commodious or luxurious than a fuel tank.
I was misinformed about the fuel tanks. :o But, Ursa! You make it sound like NASA is sending people up in “garbage scows” kinda like that Andy Griffith movie, “Scavenger”, I think it was called.
“Capt’n! They called the Enterprise a garbage scow!” (Scotty of Star Trek).
Jinx,
Astronauts are pioneers, and as such make a lot of sacrifices. You don’t seem to realize just how hard and expensive it is to get stuff up there. If it’s a choice between going to space in a “garbage scow” or not going at all, believe me, there isn’t an astronaut alive that wouldn’t give his/her right arm for a seat on the scow. The USS Enterprise is a long way away. We’re still at the Huck Finn river raft stage right now, as far as space travel is concerned.
Consider that Perry would have never made it to the North Pole if he’d tried to bring a tent with him. He was willing to sleep outside with the dogs to save that extra 30 or 40 pounds. Columbus didn’t wait for the luxery yacht to be invented before crossing the Atlantic.
This sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Even if making the tank into a viable living space were too difficult (we’ll put the kitchen HERE and the couch over THERE…and I just love the bead curtain in front of the airlock!), it still seems like it would be very useful as storage space for the station. The thing is already airtight, so it could be filled with a breathable atmosphere I guess, but even that would be optional if it were just for storage. The attractive feature of using the tank is that we’re often sending them out of earth’s gravity well (or practically) anyway. Since this is literally the most expensive part of getting any material for space station construction, the cost of modifications can be great and we still net an advantage. Could we perhaps design a tank that could be canibalized and reassembled in orbit? It seems like an idea worth looking into, at any rate.
Unless of course we scrap this space station nonsense and get on with a manned Mars mission like we oughttabedoon.