The Red Menace

The Red Menace

Good news from the Gusev Crater: after a scary day and a half, Spirit, NASA's robotic Mars exploration rover, has reestablished contact with an eager flight team here on Earth. The contact came early this morning in the form of a 20 minute data burst broadcast from the red planet. For the scores of scientists involved in the project, this means the hundreds of millions of dollars and countless man hours put into landing the rover on Mars won't be wasted after only a few weeks of exploration. More importantly, for me, this means more mind blowing, high quality images of Mars. Since Spirit touched down on the third, I have spent about half an hour of every morning studying the latest pictures and reading press releases about the minutiae of the Martian landscape. I have never spent this much time on a .gov website before. In fact, before the Mars project, I can't say I've ever spent any serious amount of time on a US government endorsed website.

This has major implications for our president. His administration is in charge of one of the most popular websites on the Internet (as of today it is ranked 302 on Alexa) and there isn't anything on the site that connects him to it. Think about it, every day thousands of nerds visit this site and try to found out as much about Mars as they can. What if they also found out that George W. Bush supports the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life and is dedicated to furthering our understanding of our universe through blah, blah, blah, vote for Bush. It doesn't matter that he's taking credit for something he doesn't have a whole lot to do with. Politicians do it all the time. It worked for Gore, didn't it? I can't say that I voted for W. his first time around or that I plan to vote for him in November, but if he were to change the focus of his campaign from the War on Terror to the War on Space, I might at least watch one of his debates.