How long did it take for Curiosity Lander to reach Mars? I want
the Mars landing by Curiosity Lander to be a bigger deal than it
seems to be. The anonymous nature of the journey and landing
suggest space exploration has become something easy to ignore.
We don't know this stuff is going on, and we don't care. So sad.
Times science reporter Sandi Doughton wrote about the Redmond
rocketeers who made the engines for the Mars mission. This
sentence leaped out: "The Redmond team started working on the
Curiosity project in 1998." NASA spacecraft have made 13 trips
to Mars, with seven landings. Curiosity cost $2.5 billion, and
features lots of gizmos to look for the chemicals that support
life as we know it. The lander set down where there are signs of
water. So much good work done in anonymous silence is a puzzle.
OK, so it took 253 days to reach Mars. NASA needs to do a better
job of building a constituency for its work, and launching the
imaginations of the next generation of rocket scientists. Maybe
the word "ign