Wonder how they will fix tears and breaks in the cable due to meteors and space junk?


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>>>Do you keep up with the Mars Rovers.
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>>No I haven't been. Like you say, it's still going and I'd forgotten all about it. As you may have seen from my recent posts I've been reading the AC Clarke book "Sands of Mars", written in 1951. So I get all the info I need about Mars from that :-)
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>>Thanks, I'll be interested to follow the actual mission now.
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>>Apparently we're already supposed to have several colonies on Mars, covered with pressurised domes, and there is vegetaion that absorbs water from the soil abd produces gaseous oxygen as a by-product, and animals that graze on these plants and thus get their O2 needs. I guess the rover has missed these :-)
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>>For all feminists out there, a precis of a passage in the book, concerning the colonists' stop for tea break all at the same time in the PM, in a large canteen: "... One of the women, older than the other girls, probably a senior secretary ..." ARRRRRGH! These women, BTW, occupy a large typing pool/admin office.
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>>>http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/
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>>>Still going well outside their warranty period and Opportunity about to reach the edge of Victoria Crater.
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>I don't know how old you are but I remember watching Armstrong walk on the moon on Television. If you had told me then how little progress manned space flight would have made in the subsequent 35 years I'd never have believed it.
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>Interestingly the current Orion plans for returning to the moon and then onto Mars look very like Apollo. The space shuttle gets ditched and its back to all throw away hardware.
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>But real access to space will have to wait for the space elevator. (Another AC Clarke book Fountains of Paradise)
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>http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_elevator_020327-1.html