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Whoa. As many people noted on Twitter: Didn’t see this one coming. Time Magazine named NASA’s Ares rocket as the 2009 Invention of the Year. Ares beat out the what has been billed as the world’s best paper airplane, the bladeless fan, rubber made from dandelions, and, my favorite, teleportation. I don’t know who Time had for their judges, but obviously Buzz Aldrin wasn’t among them. Check out his Huffington Post article where he says although the Ares I-X launched looked spectacular, Ares 1 needs to be scrapped.
Technically speaking, its for the Ares system and not just the I-X test flight.
If they follow the plan to any measure the big rocket will be measurably more powerful than a Saturn V… and the last time we had that much thrust at our disposal, we did some pretty amazing things with it.
So assuming something fantastic happens as a result of the big rocket, people would be looking back at the first small test as the moment it all began. Kinda the same how we look back on the first I-B launch.
What bugs me is how NASA gets a sliver of good press and people still complain.
We made the front page without blowing something up for once… be happy!
“… without blowing …”
Not true – I had to wipe my whole screen for coffee after that. Damn you, Maxwell! 😀
Glad for the link to Buzz Aldrin’s Huffington Post article. Can anyone comment on his Aquila proposal?
World’s best paper aeroplane? Meh. It just stays in the air for a long time, that’s all. I’m an advocate of the view that distance is a more important metric than time when comparing paper aeroplanes, and in my experience the classic model everyone learns as a kid travels further and straighter than most of these showy modern types.
Dandelion rubber is hardly news. It was tried during the War, but found to be much too inefficient.