NASA's Mars site breaks records
In an effort to get more public support for its programs, NASA has made significantly more information public according to this New York Times story (registration required). And there's a lessening desire amongst us to actually go to Mars when we can increasingly simulate the experience so well via the images sent back by robots and machines. Yet another reason why George W. Bush's expensive Mars proposal may be getting less support than the White House had expected.
Since the rover Spirit landed on Mars three weeks ago, 32 million people have visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Web site, dwarfing the numbers of any other space event, including last year's space shuttle accident. The agency recorded four billion hits, one for each item called up on the site, as the visitors browsed through hundreds of pictures considering what rock to zoom in on. That was well over the number of hits recorded in the entire previous year.
..."There has been an enduring idea that one day everyone would fly in space," said Howard McCurdy, author of "Space and the American Imagination" (Smithsonian, 1997). "But now young people are saying maybe we all go into space but we go mentally, virtually, electronically — we don't go with our bodies. As the technology gets better, the virtual reality could get quite profound."