Mars Rover Launch

[Pat Mustard]

I watched the feed and was looking at the chat box, always amazed at the ignorance of some of the comments, like "I hope the astronauts are ok" or "why is there smoke coming off it, is it on fire?"
I would think that if the go to the trouble of watching it they should have some understanding about what they are seeing.

Unrelated to getting stuff onto Mars, but I was once sat on the opposite aisle of a well dressed businesswoman on a propeller plane between Dublin and Cardiff who, half way through the flight, asked the flight attendant, in all seriousness, "When are they going to turn the engines off? They're very loud".

The flight attendant was speechless, literally, for about fifteen seconds before saying "we, ah, need them to stay in the air".

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Unrelated to getting stuff onto Mars, but I was once sat on the opposite aisle of a well dressed businesswoman on a propeller plane between Dublin and Cardiff who, half way through the flight, asked the flight attendant, in all seriousness,  "When are they going to turn the engines off? They're very loud".

The flight attendant was speechless, literally, for about fifteen seconds before saying "we, ah, need them to stay in the air".

I sat next to two young ladies on a trip from Leonardo da Vinci to JFK once. One gal looks out the window at the Atlantic and shouts "OH! A LIFERAFT!!!". We were six miles up right then, she was looking at a supertanker.

[Fireball]

Actually, the Phoenix lander of 2007 also carried a microphone with one of its cameras.   NASA never actually turn either the microphone Or the camera on during the entire mission.

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In the novel Watney’s supplies needed a Chinese booster to get into space.   

Incidentally there is also a Chinese rover currently on its way to Mars.   It was launched days ago and will arrive at Mars within days of the NASA rover.   The Chinese rover is unusual in that the landing site is not selected before launch.   Apparently the orbiter is suppose to spend 6 month in orbit about Mars looking for a suitable landing site before sending the rover down.

The UAE also have an orbiter on the way. 

But I’m actually more interested in Ingenuity than in the rover. Assuming the mission beats the almost 50% failure rate for Mars probes, it’ll be intriguing to see how well a helicopter performs on Mars.

Boru

That helicopter is going to have an interesting set of rotors. Guess I'll have to go do some looking around. Now that I'm retired I spend very little time thinking about the aerospace industry. I guess 28 years in the business left me a bit burnt out.

[Gawdzilla Sama]