Mars Lander revisited

I though that with all the hullabaloo about the Mars Lander that we had finally sent up the equivalent of a ocean oil rig with bolted on fixtures like a bulldozer, a heavy duty backhoe, an industrial laser cutter, a nuclear power plant capable of running a city and a pair of those disgusting balls that hang off the towbar on a pickup truck.

NASA, it turns out, sent a child’s toy with a Bake-my-Cookies oven and cheap digital camera that was on sale in Wal-Mart.

It’s been there about two weeks. Two long weeks. After this time and the cumulative knowledge of 30 + years on on-Mars exploration, the stupid thing can’t answer a simple question – is there water in the soil? It, and the airheads here controlling it, hasn’t a clue. They don’t. And I’ll bet that they’ll end this mission like all the others, looking forward to the next one having "generated more questions than have been answered.” Jesus.

Come on. This is Mars 101 - beginner’s stuff - that any dimwit with a slide rule or a calculator should have worked out years ago. It’s been 30 years for crying out loud since we first visited the place. Didn’t we figure all this out with the Hubble telescope that could see the hair on flea's ass from gezillion miles away? How about all the probes? The X-ray spectra-what’s-it telescopes? And the flux capacitor for Christ’s sake – what about the flux-capacitor? Didn’t anything work?

Am I the only one that thinks that NASA comprises of a building full of retards? Are they crammed into said building like those guys who broke a world record cramming into a VW years ago? We’ve given these propeller-heads hundreds of millions of dollars – billions over the years. And for what?

They’re experts at crashing their stuff – absolute experts, I’ll give them that. However, after spending billions of dollars, BILLIONS, we still don’t know of there’s water on Mars. We seem to know less about Mars now that we did when we were still swinging from the trees and wondering who stuck a cherry in the sky.

I have to ask - who gave these idiots the money to begin with? It seems that they are given money based on whatever budgetary numbers pop out of their mouths – “a hundred billion trillion.” And off goes a check. The only way that they have managed to keep getting funded is that someone has pictures of politicians in compromising positions with sheep or cows or “the gays” or something.

Are these really the people who put men on the moon? They can’t be. Can they? They lost an entire day’s worth of images today due to a data “glitch.” Don’t scientists know how to backup? It I’ll bet they’re got the porn on their laptops backed up.

I was never a believer – it was something I pooh-poohed really - in the fanciful Capricorn One theory that the moon landing was all done on a movie sound stage, designed to fool us in the days before Photoshop. I have to say that after seeing what NASA is doing now fumbling around on the red planet, I’m a believer baby, I’m a believer.