Sunshine at Ocarina had a blog post this morning about the role Nirvanix is playing with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that is orbiting the moon and taking high resolution images of it's surface to prepare for future missions to the moon.
A week ago I net up with an old friend who works at NASA and he was talking about his work and what NASA was up to. With the shuttle program ending next year, the push at NASA is to get back to the moon, not for short visits like the Apollo program made, but for extended work and research at a lunar research facility.
Not everybody likes the idea of pouring resources into an extensive manned program when it would be possible to do a lot of work with robots. But why give robots all the fun when they don't even know what fun is? More to the point, there is probably a lot to be gained by engaging international teams in this mission. One of the best ways to get a perspective on our earthly situation is to see it from space. Moving beyond us-versus-them thinking and the resulting conflicts that destroy so much would be a very good thing. Robots aren't going to help much on that front, so I say let's get on with this work and go to the moon together and find what whatever we find.
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