Jinx wrote: > > > So what's with this obsession of sending men into space to > > do a worse job than robots? > > Um, populist ? And robots aren't "sexy" I don't know about that. Nice gleaming stainless steel, glass and chrome is pretty 'sexy' to an engineer/scientist. Especially when it's 200 million miles away and working perfectly . And robots rarely get 'headaches' Spirit's current problems notwithstanding. And how do you 'reprogram' a space sick astronaut? And I think the population is now only interested in space when something goes seriously wrong (witness Apollo 13). However, NASA said that they'd had over 4 BILLION hits on the JPL site since Spirit landed. I think they forgot to thank the web team when handing out the congratulations last night, since the site didn't collapse under the onslaught of interest. Those Mars images aren't tiny files. Robert -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body